• "My work explores the awakening of the self and the other... It is an awakening of the hidden meanings in elements of our mundane lives, to which the viewers previously haven't paid much attention."

• Growing up in South Korea, Kimsooja describes her complex spiritual background informed by Buddhism, Catholicism, and a code of moral conduct influenced by Confucianism. After high school, she intentionally "stepped out of organized religion in order to experience the real world". The artist felt uncomfortable with the systematization of beliefs and behavior within the faith traditions. Although Kimsooja does not practice Buddhism formally, her beliefs and personal practices strongly parallel this philosophy of life.

• A Laundry Woman (2002) is a video projection that suggests the harmony of the universe through its stillness and tranquility (figs. 25 and 26). It documents a meditative performance by the artist along the Yamuna River in North India. Videotaped from a slightly elevated vantage point and seen from the back, Kimsooja's figure is silhouetted against blue, opalescent waters. Although the sky is not visible, the viewer is made conscious of its presence by the reflections of flying birds in the water. The artist remains perfectly still while the video captures her state of quiet mindfulness.

• Kimsooja describes her experience during this meditation: "In the middle of the performance, I was completely confused...[about] whether it is the river which is running and moving or myself." The artist's perceptions of space and time were turned upside down and mentally she became completely immersed in and at one with the water. She later realized that it is not the river that constantly changes but her body, which is transforming all the time: "My body will disappear while the river is still flowing."

• While watching the video, the viewer slowly becomes aware of the ritual offerings and ashes of deceased people who were cremated at a site along the river. The cycle of life and death becomes a powerful theme in the work. Kimsooja began thinking of the decomposed bodies that floated before her. She meditated on "their lives and their memories and was trying to purify their bodies as well as mine. Praying for their future life with compassion for human beings." The artist experienced a heightened sense of what she describes as "awakeness", particularly in her awareness of the relationship between nature and the body, stillness and movement, life and death.

• By interpreting the confluence of river and atmosphere, Kimsooja highlights an idea embraced by many artists in the exhibition: the unity of life. She describes the effect of blending water and sky as a mirror presenting both reality and its opposite dimension. From a formal perspective, the artist conceives the river as a surface that is similar to a two-dimensional canvas. There is a strong impulse towards abstraction in A Laundry Woman, which reflects Kimsooja's early career as a painter.

• Through the video, the artist invites the viewer to share her meditative experience. As she explains, "That is why my body is facing against the viewer. Look at what I look at. I do not present my ego, my identity." Kimsooja's desire for the viewer to "wear" her body suggests the idea of the artist as mediator in order to open possibilities for other people to participate in a "certain awareness and awakening." She points out that there are few opportunities in daily life to achieve this concentrated state of mind.

• In A Laundry Woman, Kimsooja's body in essence becomes an offering for others to use in order to achieve an expanded consciousness. "Some people referred to me as a shaman who mediates between the dead and the living. I sometimes feel that way too because, in a way, I am doing that all the time. I think it comes from compassion. Understanding others' suffering. Sharing suffering. Sharing love." For many people familiar with India, the title of the work may conjure images of the low-caste women whose livelihood revolves around the river. In this interpretation, the artist becomes the laundry woman in an act of empathy.

• While discussing the idea of pairing A Laundry Woman with a small sculpture of Buddha Shakyamuni touching the earth to witness his enlightenment, Kimsooja immediately responded to the shared symbolic gesture in the two works of art (fig. 4). She noted that her video establishes connections between the individual and nature; similarly, the Buddha links himself to the land. Through the body, she also connects herself with other human beings from all cultures. As she explains, "All human activities are about linking the self to the other."

• Relationships are a central theme in a group of installations that depict sewing as a metaphor for threading together different aspects of life. Kimsooja conceives her video works as "invisible sewing." The artist created another work with the title of Laundry Woman (exhibited at the Kunsthalle in Vienna and the Zacheta Gallery of Art in Warsaw, 2002), an installation consisting of suspended fabrics that suggest linens drying outdoors. These materials become symbols of women, love, the body, and sleep. On a social level, they are associated with women's roles in society. For Kim, cloth transcends its materiality and functions as "a container for the spirit"; people are swathed at birth and at death in cloth, and it is also used ceremonially in weddings and other rites of passage.

• The Laundry Woman also relates to a group of works called Bottari — beautifully wrapped bundles of used Korean bedcovers, fabrics that are either manufactured or sewn by mothers and daughters as shared experiences. These pieces of cloth remind us of the cycle of life; they are used to bundle together household possessions when leaving home, and they help to establish domestic comfort in the absence of a true shelter. Their stitches bind people together.

• Kimsooja insists that what is most essential is not the body of work but the questions that it raises. She hopes that the viewer will participate in her works by sharing this inquiring state of mind. When asked what her hopes were for the museum visitor, she replied, "I would like the audience to share with me the experience I had during my performance, question and answer, and really put each one's state of mind and body into that position."

• Visitors arriving at this gallery, recently relocated to midtown from Harlem, will step into a darkened room carpeted and painted meditative, deep-space blue. Sitting down risks becoming entranced by the little bubbles moving around one of the four circular red-yellow-and-blue jukebox speakers placed on each wall, where they emit a warm, tap-room glow.

• Some viewers may be as struck by the speakers' resemblance to Tibetan mandalas (symbolizing the design of the universe) as was Kimsooja, who arrived in New York from South Korea in 1998 and saw in these artifacts of American pop culture a perfect meld of East and West. Others maybe reminded of stained-glass windows, since what pours out is an ethereal mix of Gregorian, Islamic and Tibetan chants that circulate, like those bubbles, in an endless loop of male voices, both rumbling and sweet.

• In her previous installations and videos, Kimsooja focused on the body as a protective cover for powerful emotions. Korean textiles figured prominently, wrapping immigrants or outcasts as they moved from place to place with belongings that survived them and were passed to others. It is the unmoving viewer being wrapped this time, in waves of sound and light. But because there is more here to experience internally than to see, viewers may dismiss the work as a literalized notion of the-gallery-as-chapel in which to worship at the altar of art, without realizing that they are part of the ritual.

• Nicolas Bouriaud
  In Buddhist philosophy, there is a notion which has a great importance: the impermanence of the world we live in. The needle woman stands in front of passing-by elements, like as if you were stressing on this impermanence, or on the fluidity of things. How does the Eastern way of thinking match contemporary art history, in you work?

• Kimsooja
  The impermanence of our lives is an important notion in my work and thinking and with this perception, comes a deeper compassion for human beings. Meditation about impermanence has been shading in my work since I first started the sewing pieces in the early 80's — connecting fragments of my deceased grandmother's clothes.

• Buddhist philosophy, especially Zen Buddhism is similar to the way I perceive and function in the world. However, the ideas in my work are created from my own questions and experiences, not from Buddhist theory itself. (It is more complicated — as I was brought up formally a catholic, and practiced also Christian for some time, but Korean daily life practice is greatly dominated by Confucianism, mixture of Buddhism, and Shamanism.)

• Certainly, where my immediate perceptions and decisions in art making meets the disciplines of Buddhism — making art and living my life are not consciously borrowed from theories. I intentionally stopped reading over a decade ago to concentrate and follow my own thoughts, but I recently started reading again especially on Buddhism as I find amazing similarities in my work and perception of life in it.

• I might add that, the Eastern way of thinking inhabits every context of contemporary art history not just as a theory but as attitude melded in ones personality and existence and is inseparable with Western thinking.

• Nicolas Bouriaud
  Do you think that oriental (eastern) thought has a real impact on the contemporary art world, or is it only a postmodern kind of exoticism, a decor for western aesthetic investigations?

• Kimsooja
  It would be unfortunate if the Western art world considered Eastern thought as a decor for Western aesthetic investigation — as if it were another element to add without noticing the fact that it is a way — in the process of making art. It is always there — as a dialectic — in all basic phenomena of art and life together. Eastern thought often functions in a passive and reserved way of expression, usually invisible, non verbal, indirect, disguised, and immaterial. Western thought functions more with identity, controversy, gravity, construction in general rather than de-construction, and material than immaterial compared to Eastern. The process finally becomes the awareness and necessity of the presence of both in contemporary Art. It is the 'Yin' and 'Yang' — a co-existence that endlessly transforms and enriches.

• Nicolas Bouriaud
  You could have chosen to ignore your Korean cultural background, but you decided to use it as a material. In a way, especially the Bottari series, your work Post-produces formal elements from this already existing Korean shapes and patterns. But formally speaking, your exhibitions are playing with minimal art. Would minimalism play a special role onto this connection between East and West? And which movements or artists were the most influential for you?

• Kimsooja
  I have always used my personal life as the basic material for my work — hoping it would embrace the other. If I hadn't grown up and lived as a married woman in a Korean society, I wouldn't have chosen these traditional bedcovers. In Korea, they have a special meaning as the bed is the site of birth and death — of sleeping, loving, suffering, dreaming dying — it frames our existence. The bedcover is given to and used by newly married couples in Korea with messages beautifully embroidered and emblematic of wishes for love, fortune, happiness, many sons, and a long life.... it is so easy to notice it's contradiction when we see these symbols. I can't interpret my own culture with other culture's materials in the same way..... I try to find materials in their own context, but it always ended up with me bringing materials from Korea as theirs looked so neutral and hard to get the sense of the energy I feel from ours.

• As for minimalism, I agree with you as a part of the nature of my practice but in the sense of extension of it's interpretation to the life as well as formalistic terms. The Japanese art critic Keiji Nakamura perceives my work as 'existential minimalism,' and this makes sense to me also. I greatly respect minimalism in the sense of the process of making art as well as it's vision. However the contents minimalists deal with are often maximal. It's hard to name any particular artist who was influential to me as I've been influenced in a way from anyone whom I have an opinion on their work-even from the ones we don't agree with. Yet, there is one statement by John Cage I saw it written in the bottom corners of an empty container at the 1985 Paris Biennale; that has reverberated for a long time in my mind. "Whether we try to make it or not, the sound is heard.".

• Nicolas Bouriaud
  You are partly working with objects and surfaces made by other people. Of course the readymade is not a stake anymore, but in your case it could be questioned on a social or psychological level. The notion of existential minimalism could bring us to this direction, too, because it carries the idea of humanity, concrete people making products in a particular context. So what is the status of those objects in your mind and in your work in general? Is it a neutral process to use those bedcovers, or do you consider their context of production and the condition of the workers? And, more generally, what is the status of pre-existing things in an artwork?

• Kimsooja
  Analyzing the nature of my already-mades, can give a significant clue to the context of my work. I've been using objects from Korean domestic daily life significantly in my series, 'Deductive Object' from the early 90's. Here, I chose traditional Korean domestic already-mades; wooden window frames, reels, drums, and agricultural tools; a saw, shovels, forks, hooks... and wrapped them with old Korean clothes and bedcovers.

• Now, I as am working exclusively in New York, I'm using objects found here; a child's toilet, a swing, vessels and an old directory board from a department store...etc. I've been thinking more about people who owned and used the objects and their traces rather than the people who made or manufactured them in those objects and I'm noticing that they are symbolically genderized in form and function.

• Perhaps we need to re-define the notion of readymade in a larger context than relying on Marcel Duchamp's investigation — especially in this mass producing, global networking era which needs constant re-definition. My work is about pre-existing things buried into our daily lives — not mentioned nor conceptualized in art history.

• My work also includes a presentation of the daily life of women's labor and her domestic performance trying to re-define the social, cultural and esthetic meaning of it to create it's own context in contemporary art history.

• Nicolas Bouriaud
  This concept of pre-existence of things is very interesting. In a way, one could say that you are working with the ghosts of the objects, their aura, trying to turn the invisible into a shared experience. The anonymous is supposed to be invisible; so is the past, mostly. Is that important for you to make them visible?

• Kimsooja
  Yes. Depending on the nature of the already-made objects, my interest lies on different issues; for example, when I work with bed covers, I am working with pre-existing objects focusing more on the fact of 'pre-used' rather than 'pre-made' as I am more focused on anonymity of the bodies and the destinies of the couples rather than on anonymity who made the bed covers, although I am concern about the people who made them.

• On the other hand, the folklore objects I've used, my interest lies more on the genderized nature and esthetic structure of the object and it's function in daily life rather than the anonymous beings who made or used them. But when I made a series of carpets which embeded names of the African American slaves who used to work for the plantation houses in the US, I was trying to combine the nature of the painstaking labor of carpet weavers and that of the African American plantation slaves emphasizing both of theirs hardships as I find carpet weaving and plantation job is similar jobs in different dimension. I wish to reveal this anonymity — as myself — one of the anonymous.

• Nicolas Bouriaud
  The Needle woman is a central figure in your video works: You are standing in front of people and objects, right in the middle of a maelstrom of things, as if you were out of the world. Is that another figure of anonymity (the voyeur? Or are you even more into the world by watching it pass?)

• Kimsooja
  It is the point of the needle which penetrates the fabric, and we can connect two different parts of the fabrics with threads, through the eye of the needle.

• A needle is an extension of the body, and a thread is an extension of mind. The traces of mind stays always in the fabric, but the needle leaves the site when it's medialization is complete. The needle is a medium, a mystery, a reality, a hermaphrodite, a barometer, a moment, and a Zen.

• Nicolas Bouriaud
  Watching the needle woman, I was also thinking about a negative image of the baudelairian flaneur, an archetypal figure of the occidental modernity. Are you inscribing your work in the field of modernity, or is it a notion that is totally irrelevant for you?

• Kimsooja
  It is interesting to see my work discussed in this way — being compared to others from a completely different culture and social identity and also born at different time and space. My work is focused on the totality of life and art. One can see different realities in one persona or in art. Perhaps that is why one sees diverse similarities in my work.

• Nicolas Bouriaud
  In a way, you are trying to capture the totality of human experience, which is quite rare. As you said, your work is not about any particular issue? Can you tell me what this ambition implies, and means?

• Kimsooja
  Totality is the truth and the reality of things. And it takes time to clarify in language as a whole. I am interested in approaching the reality that embraces everything because it is the only way to get to the point without manipulations. Most people approach reality from analysis or 'from language to colligation' which is the truth', but I am proposing a 'colligation to be analyzed' by audiences. My working process is intuitive and I believe it's own logic. If I have an ambition, it is to be just a 'being' who has no need to be anyone special, but is freed from human follies and desires — without doing anything particular. 'Being nothing/nothingness' and 'making nothing/nothingness' is my goal. It is a long process.

• Nicolas Bouriaud
  To be "freed from desires" sounds very buddhistic. Is the artist a kind of boddhisattva, who tries to free himself/herself and to liberate the viewer?

• Kimsooja
  I remember the way desire was talked about in the 80's through the work of "simulationnist" artists such as Jeff Koons or Haim Steinbach : art was the absolute object of desire, a "pure merchandise," a perfect exchange value. Desire was examined in terms of compulsion and acquisition. So today, what would be the relationships between art and desire?

• In any case, artists have been constantly dealing with their own desire and audience. For me, artists' practices are similar to that of Buddhist monks' in the sense that they both try to liberate and to become beyond themselves. In this era of globalization and technology however, the self, the body, the spirit, and the other can be perused in many ways -Artists deal with different types of desires depending on their social and cultural context. Desire can be visualized in a physical object form which satisfies sense of 'possession' or in a psychological and metaphorical way that deals desire as another 'subject'. When Claud Viallat said 'Desire leads', I think he referred to another origin of art instinct which links and visualizes these two different source of desires. Artists cannot help ask what is the origin of their desire, and what role desire plays in their work. To understand that this is 'the subject' an artist confronts in the end, and to extinguish it.

• 한국 태생의 뉴욕 기반 작가 김수자의 예술 세계에서 우리는 익명의 존재라는 개념 위에 세워진 하나의 전체 커리어를 본다. 익명의 존재라는 개념은, 자아의 솔직한 주장에 통상 반하여 작용하는 힘과 환경에 어우러지려는 소망을 드러내는 메타포다. 김수자의 예술은 항상 예상을 뒤집으며 이것은 그가 세계를 포용하는 한 가지 방식이다. 김수자의 자아 퍼포먼스는 대립인 동시에 묵종이며, 운명의 순응인 동시에 의지의 표출이다. 김수자의 명백히 익명적인 행위에는 엄청난 힘과 주장이 있으며, 그것은 도전인 동시에 운명의 인정이다. 김수자가 대립물로서 제시하며 다루는 바로 그 환경들은 자아가 자기 자신을 규정하기 위해 꼭 필요한 것이라고 해도 좋을 것이다—전체가 부분을 규정하는 것과 비슷한 이치에서 말이다. 김수자는 어떤 통합된 알아차림(awareness)을 획득하기 위한 싸움 속에서 이름 없이 홀로 서 있다. 이 알아차림이라는 말의 정의들은 경계 없는 흐름 속에 있기에 어쩌면 불교적으로 보일 것이다. 익명성을 정교하게 구축함으로써 김수자는 자아를 지우려는 욕망, 그리고 그가 침묵 속에서 웅변적으로 맞서는 환경을 대면하기 위해 필요한 결단 사이의 대립적 모순들을 예리하게 알아차리는 감수성을 보여준다.

• <바늘여인(A Needle Woman)>(1999~2001) 퍼포먼스에서 김수자가 도쿄의 시부야 거리를 오가는 행인들 한가운데 서 있을 때 그의 위치는 안티테제로 시작되지만, 시간이 지나며 이는 인간의 회복력에 대한 무언의 긍정, 심지어—자기 자신에게 익명성의 조건을 부과하고 있음에도 불구하고—개인의 가치에 대한 무언의 긍정이 된다. 놀라운 가치의 전환 속에서 김수자의 행위들은 말 그대로 죽음이라는 자신의 한계를 점점 더 인식해가는 자아의 발전을 구현하고, 그는 마치 언제나 제 시간보다 한발 앞서 존재하는 죽음을 애도하고 있는 것만 같다. 그러나 김수자의 시각에서 나타나는 전반적인 지향점은 어둡거나 섬뜩한 것과는 거리가 멀다. 김수자의 예술은 삶의 환경을 암묵적으로 수용하는 통찰적 인식을 드러내며, 그가 다양한 문화와 교류하는 것—김수자는 <바늘여인> 퍼포먼스를 전 세계 여덟 개 도시에서 선보였다(순서대로 도쿄, 상하이, 델리, 뉴욕, 멕시코시티, 카이로, 라고스, 런던)—은 어느 환경에서든 존재를 긍정하는 것이나 다름없다.

• 김수자가 예술가로서 성장한 과정은 꾸준하고도 분명했다. 1957년 한국 대구시에서 태어난 그는 서울 홍익대학교에서 회화를 전공하고 1984년 동 대학원을 졸업했다. 이후 반년간 프랑스 정부의 보조금을 받으며 프랑스에서 지냈다. 1992~3년에는 뉴욕 P.S. 1 현대미술관(P.S. 1 Contemporary Art Center) 레지던스 입주 작가로 미국에 왔다. 문화적 망명을 선택한 그는 1998년에 다시 뉴욕으로 돌아왔고 이후 미국에 정착해 이곳에서 점차 더 큰 인정을 받으며 국제적 명성을 누리는 예술가로 성장했다. 화가로 보낸 시간은 그리 길지 않았지만 그는 줄곧 표면의 문제를 탐구하는 데 관심이 있었기에 예술가로 활동하는 내내 이 질문에 대한 탐구를 이어왔다. 실제로 김수자가 말하길 "이러한 [표면의] 탐구는, 예술적 자유를 추구하는 나의 의지와 더불어, 나의 예술에서 새로운 지평을 여는 것을 가능하게 했다." 표현 방식의 변화는 빠르게 찾아왔다. 일찍이 1983년, 그러니까 아직 대학원에 재학 중일 때 김수자는 "1983년 나는 전통적인 이불보를 바느질하던 중에 예술과 삶을 질문하는 수단으로서 바느질이라는 방법론을 처음 발견했다." 김수자는 일상생활에서 쓰는 직물을 새로운 종류의 캔버스로 활용하기로 결정했다. 그러나 바느질이라는 행위는 애도와 뗄 수 없는 개인적인 행위이기도 했다. "나는 헌 옷을 바느질하는 작업을 한 해 전에 돌아가신 할머니가 남긴 옷가지로 처음 시도했다."
  김수자는 캔버스 표면을 "화가가 극복하기를 소망하는 장벽이며 장애물"로 보고 이것에 관해 질문하는 화가로서 시작했다. 10년의 세월에 걸쳐 김수자는 다양한 매체와 전략—비디오와 퍼포먼스—을 통합하는 새로운 단계로 이행했고, 이 과정에서 작품의 강조점은 표면의 문제에서 이제 그가 새로 인식한 언어인 둘둘 만 헌 옷과 이불, 즉 이미지 봇짐(an image bundle)으로 이동했다. 김수자 예술의 변화는 갈수록 더 상징적인 재료의 사용을 중심으로 전개되었다. 어째서 이불보를 사용하느냐는 질문에 김수자는 이렇게 답한다. "이불보는 상징적인 장소다. 우리가 태어나고, 쉬고, 사랑하는 곳이며, 꿈꾸고, 앓고, 마침내 죽음을 맞이하는 곳이다. 그것은 몸의 기억을 살아 있게 하고, 그 기억들은 또다른 차원을 만든다." 이제 김수자는 퍼포먼스와 비디오의 세계에 집중한다. 자신의 환경을 더욱 알레고리적으로 읽는 쪽으로 방향을 틀었고 그러한 독해 안에서 김수자의 삶과 행위는 우리의 삶과 행위를 대표하는 한 존재로서 기능한다. 김수자는 우리의 행위가 내면 깊은 곳의 고립을 드러내며, 우리의 유한한 시간 앞에서 행동은 전형적(paradigmatic) 의미를 띤다는 인식을 우리 모두가 공유한다는 것을 이해하기에, 인간의 조건을 본질적으로 익명적인 것으로 받아들인다. 김수자의 예술에서 우리의 죽음에 대한 이해는 그가 한 개인으로서 관객을 위한 매개체가 되어줌으로써 명료해진다. 김수자의 행위들은 관람자와의 존재론적 대화 속으로 들어오기 때문에 관람자에게 울림을 준다. 이 대화는 죽음의 현존이 연상시키기 마련인 높은 도덕적 진지함으로 가득하다.

• <바늘여인>은 군중 한가운데에서 본래 사색적 성격을 띠는 울림 있는 침묵을 제시함으로써 우리 모두가 느끼는 고립을 행위로 구현한다. 김수자는 불교 수행자가 아님에도 최근의 퍼포먼스에서 선불교와 친연성을 발견한다. 김수자의 예술은 자신의 수행을 오롯이 알아차리는 명상하는 정신을 연상시킨다. 그는 자기 자신의 감각을 거부하고, 세계의 에너지—또는 소음—을 흡수함으로써 치유하고 결속시키는 태도를 선택한다. 김수자 스스로 말하듯 "[1983년부터] 10년간의 바느질 수행 끝에 나 자신을 자연의 직물을 엮는 바늘로 여기게 되었다."

• 작가는 바늘과 실크의 정밀한 메타포로 표현되는 무아(selflessness)의 행위로서 실재의 이질적인 부분들을 한데 모으고자 한다. 김수자가 여덟 개 도시에서 군중과 나누는 말없는—심지어 기도하는 듯한—상호작용은 완강한 목적의식뿐 아니라, 부동의 상태와 침묵이 자아내는 다양한 반응을 안전하게 흡수할 수 있도록 의도적으로 지운 자아를 보여준다. 비디오는 김수자의 활동을 직접 보면서 상호작용들의 아카이브를 창출한다. 흥미롭게도, 김수자는 여러 도시에서의 활동을 기록하는 비디오의 활용 역시 메타포적으로 바라본다. "관객들이 내 퍼포먼스의 결과물인 비디오를 볼 때 또다른 마주침이 발생한다. 내 몸은 바로미터의 역할을, 서로 다른 시간과 공간의 사람들을 잇는 바늘의 역할을 한다." 퍼포먼스가 지속되는 내내 김수자는 자아가 가장 우선한다는 환상을 소멸시킴으로써 사람들을 결속시키는 매듭을 강조하려고 한다.

• 김수자의 11일에 걸친 서사시적 여정 〈떠도는 도시들 – 2727km 보따리 트럭(Cities on the Move—2,727 Kilometers by Bottari-Truck)〉(1997년 11월)은 그의 기억 속 장소들을 되짚는다. 김수자는 색색의 보따리를 트럭 가득 싣고 과거에 살던 도시와 마을을 여행했다. 김수자는 이 퍼포먼스가 "기억과 역사를 싣고 있는 사회적 조각(social sculpture)으로서 물리적·정신적 공간을 찾아내고 동등화한다"고 여긴다. 김수자가 태백산을 지나는 모습을 목격하는 이 비디오는 그가 과거와 마주하려고 애쓰면서 지고 가는 문자 그대로의 짐을 감동적으로 보여준다. 이 퍼포먼스는 김수자의 여행을 우리 존재의 서사에 대한 메타포로 제시한다. 이 전시회 도록에서 김수자가 말하듯 "'보따리 트럭'은 공간과 시간을 가로지르는 과정적 오브제(processing object)로서 그곳/우리가 떠나는 곳/우리가 가는 곳에 우리 자신을 데려다놓는 동시에 그로부터 떠나게 한다." 비유적 언어는 관객을 형이상학적 차원으로 끌어들여 그의 여정을 우리 여정의 상징으로 읽기를 요구한다. 김수자의 탁월함이 특히 잘 드러나는 때는 그의 이미지들이 알아차림의 상징적 표현으로 제시될 때다. 길을 따라 이동한다는 개념은 그 사람이 사라지면 그 길도 끝난다는 불가피한 결말과 깊이 공명한다. 아직 실현되지 않은 프로젝트들에 관해 이야기해 달라는 질문에 김수자는 도록에서 이렇게 답한다. "나는 내 프로젝트들을 내 몸 안에 갖고 있으며 내게는 몸이 내 스튜디오입니다. 나는 그것들을 모두 기억하거나 설명하려고 하지 않습니다." 이 진술은 김수자는 창조성의 원천을 자신의 몸 안에 갖고 있으며, 그것은 그가 그토록 세심하게 제시하는 익명적인 공적 자아의 대응물로 작용한다는 것을 우리에게 다시금 환기한다. 우리가 김수자의 퍼포먼스 비디오에서 그의 얼굴을 결코 보지 못하는 것이 사실이라면 이는 김수자의 익명성이 그를 둘러싼 세계에서 일어나는 모든 일을 아우를 만큼 충분히 크기 때문이다.

• 김수자가 머문 기억에 남겨진 발자취를 따라가다 보면 그가 밟는 길(道, path)—이 자체로 불교 용어다—의 함의는 불교와의 깊은 친연성을 시사한다는 것이 분명하게 보인다. 김수자가 "관조하는 자세와 방법은 불교 수행자의 그것과 유사하다"고 작가 스스로 언급한다. 동시에 김수자는 "자기 자신만의 방식으로 세계를 관조하고 자기 자신만의 길이 이따금 사유의 드넓은 흐름과 만날 수 있는 독립된 개인"으로 남아 있을 권리를 간직한다. 작품의 고립 속에서 김수자는 세계와의 보편적 조응을 추구하지만, 그것은 어디까지나 그 자신만의 방식으로 또한 그 자신만의 경험을 통해서다. 김수자의 알레고리들이 성공적인 이유는 겉으로 보이는 모습과 달리 그것들이 실은 매우 개인적인 목적에서 나온 것이기 때문이다. 어떤 관점에서 김수자의 익명성은 하나의 속임수이자, 한계라는 개념이 무의미할 정도로 그 경계가 확장된 자아의 감각을 이야기하는 한 가지 방식이다. 김수자의 고립에서 특이한 점은 그것이 실제로는 관객과 온전히 교류한다는 데 있다. 김수자는 보편적 함의를 강조하는 한 가지 방법으로서 고독을 제시하는 동시에, 타자들과의 광범위한 연루로 나아가는 한 가지 방법으로서 자율성을 강조한다. 실제로 김수자의 외로운 행위들은 도움을 요청하는 듯 보인다—2001년 라오스에서 촬영된 <구걸하는 여인(A Beggar Woman)> 비디오에서 가부좌를 틀고 앉은 김수자는 손을 뻗어 구걸한다. 누군가 그에게 동전을 건네고, 이 장면은 무성으로 제작되어 작가의 취약한 상태를 더욱 강렬하게 드러낸다. 우리는 이 상호작용을 어디에나 있는 궁핍의 증거로 읽는다. 김수자는 결핍을 극적으로 표현함으로써 자기 자신을—그리고 우리도—욕망들의 무아적 합성물, 완전한 빈곤의 구현으로 환원한다.

• 그리하여 김수자는 행위의 언어로 우리의 직관적 앎을 대상화한다. 이 언어에는 그 의도의 벌거벗은 본질만이 남겨져 있다. 그의 작품에는 물론 일부러 낮은 자세를 취함으로써 성취되는 페미니스트적 함의가 있다. 1999년 일본에서 <바늘 여인—기타큐슈(A Needle Woman—Kitakysuhu)>라는 제목으로 선보인 탁월한 퍼포먼스에서 김수자는 석회암 산의 정상에 드러누워 있고, 몸의 곡선은 바위의 솟음을 반향한다. 이 비디오는 예술가의 방법론을 확인해준다. 영상에서 김수자가 자신을 둘러싼 환경들과 나누는 상호작용은 그것들을 하나의 통일된 의지로 감싼다. 어머니 대지에 대한 암시가 도입되고, 여기에는 자연과의 무한한 동일시의 감각이 있다. 아울러, 일부 다른 퍼포먼스에는 정치적 함의가 담겨 있다. <구걸하는 여인> 또는 김수자가 분주한 거리의 보도에 누워 있는 <집 없는 여인—델리(A Homeless Woman—Delhi)>(2000)가 그러한 예다. 사회 변화를 옹호하는 직접적인 메시지의 부재는 이 두 작품에 영향을 주지 않는다. 이들 작품은 고통을 우리의 본질적 조건으로 표현하기 때문이다. 실로, 김수자가 제시하는 전제의 간접성은 그의 표현을 오히려 더 강력한 것으로 만든다. 그의 표현이 그 보편성에 비추어 볼 때 불가피하게 느껴지기 때문이다.

• 최근의 설치 작품 <거울여인(A Mirror Woman)>(2002)에서 김수자는 뉴욕시 피터 블럼 갤러리(Peter Blum Gallery) 가득히 헌 이불보를 매달았다. 아울러 양 벽면에는 거울을 부착해 방문객이 색색의 천으로 이루어진 미로 속을 걷는 동안 그들의 모습이 비치게 했다. 음향적 요소 역시 사용되었다—티베트 수도승의 암송 소리가 전시회장에 흘렀다. 이 작품의 관람 경험은 전반적으로 불편하리만치 내세적이었다. 어쩌면, 가장 넓은 의미에서는 김수자의 개입은 실제로 사람들을 불편하게 만든다. 그것은 우리의 죽음을 환기하기 때문이다. 김수자는 <묘비명(Epitaph)>(2002)에서 브루클린 그린포인트의 공동묘지 한가운데에서 이불보를 펄럭인다. 그 순간 삶은 그것과 명백한 대립을 이루는 죽음과 합쳐진다. 그렇게 이 작품은, 존재와 비존재 사이의 해석이 실은 우리에게 강요된 것에 지나지 않을 수 있음을 시사한다. 언뜻 이분법으로 보이는 것이 실은 한 관념의 두 측면일 때가 있다. 김수자가 예술가로서 발휘하는 강력한 힘은 열정과 고요, 능동과 수동이 하나로 합쳐지는 순간을 발견하는 데 있다.

• 그는 예술이 그릇된 이원성을 동등화하는 위대한 힘임을 우리가 이해하기를 원한다. 우리의 정신은 거의 모든 것이 담길 수 있는 장소다. 김수자는 자신의 넉넉한 비전 안에서 미지의 것에 관한 진실들—우리의 삶 위에, 그리고 우리의 삶 너머에 있는 것—을 반복해 말한다. 김수자는 우리가 암묵적으로 알고 있는 것을 가져와 거기에 공적인 우아함을 입힌다. 김수자가 자신의 예술 안에서 커질수록 우리 역시 커지고, 그리하여 그의 넉넉한 상상력은 우리를 그 안에 그야말로 완전하게 포괄한다.

• In the art of Korean-born, New York-based Kim Sooja, we see an entire career built upon the notion of the anonymous as a metaphor for the wish to merge with forces and circumstances usually acting against the forthright assertion of self. Kim's art inverts expectations as a way of embracing the world. Her performance of self is at once oppositional and acquiescent, fated and willed. There is a tremendous strength and assertion in her apparently anonymous actions, which are not so much transgressions as they are recognitions of fate. It may well be that the very circumstances Kim addresses, presenting as oppositions, are what the self needs to define itself — in much the same way the whole defines the part. Kim stands alone, unnamed, in her struggle to achieve a consolidated awareness, whose definitions may be seen as Buddhist in their unboundaried flow. In the elaborations of her anonymity, then, Kim presents a sensibility acutely aware of the warring contradictions between her desire for an erasure of self and the kind of resolve necessary to confront the environment she so eloquently, albeit silently, strives against.

• When, in the performance A Needle Woman (1999-2001), Kim stands against waves of Japanese passersby on a street in Shibuya, Tokyo, her pose begins as antithesis but becomes, over time, a wordless affirmation of human resilience, even of individual worth, despite the conditions of anonymity she imposes upon herself. In a remarkable transformation of value, her actions quite literally embody the progress of a self increasingly cognizant of its mortal limits — it is as though Kim is mourning death, which is always ahead of its time. Yet the overall thrust of her vision is far from dark or macabre; her art demonstrates a knowing perception of life's circumstances that is by implication assenting, and her engagement with different cultures — Kim has performed A Needle Woman in eight cities throughout the world (in order: Tokyo, Shanghai, Delhi, New York, Mexico City, Cairo, Lagos, and London) — amounts to an affirmation of existence no matter what the environment.

• Kim's development as an artist has been steady and assured. Born in 1957 in Taegu, Korea, she studied painting at Hong-Ik University in Seoul, where she completed graduate school in 1984. She spent half a year in France, on a grant from the French government. In 1992-93, Kim came to New York as an artist-in-residence at the contemporary art center P.S. 1. Deciding on cultural exile, Kim again returned to New York in 1998; this move marked her permanent stay in America, where she has received more and more recognition, becoming an artist of international reputation. Although Kim did not stay long as a painter, she remains interested in investigating the issue of surface, an activity she has continued throughout her career. Indeed, Kim comments, "This pursuit [of the surface], along with my will towards artistic freedom, enabled me to open up new horizons in my art." The change in expression came quickly to Kim; as early as 1983, while still in graduate school, she first "discovered the methodology of sewing as a means of questioning art and life while I was sewing a traditional bedspread in 1983." Kim made the decision to use fabric in daily life as a new kind of canvas. But the act of sewing was also personal, being tied to mourning: "My first attempt at sewing used clothes was done with the remains of my grandmother's clothing, left behind after her death a year before."

• Kim began as a painter who questioned the surface of her canvas, seeing it as "a wall and barrier that painters wish to overcome." Over the course of a decade, she moved into new developments incorporating different media and strategies — videos and performances — in which the emphasis shifted from a treatment of surface to her now recognized language of wrapped used clothes and bedding: an image bundle. The changes in her art revolved around an increasingly emblematic use of materials; when asked why she makes use of bedcovers, Kim replies: "The bedcover is a symbolic site. It is where we are born, where we rest and love, where we dream and suffer and finally die. It keeps memories of the body alive, which result in another dimension." Now that she is concentrating on the world of performance and video, Kim has turned toward an increasingly allegorical reading of her environment, in which her life and actions function as an existence representative of ours. The human condition is taken up as essentially anonymous because Kim comprehends that all of us share the recognition that our actions reveal a deep-seated isolation, as well as an unconscious awareness that behavior takes on paradigmatic meaning in the face of our limited span of time. In Kim's art our understanding of death becomes enlightened by her mediation as an individual toward her audience; her actions resonate because they enter into an existential dialogue with their viewers, replete with the high moral seriousness the presence of death inevitably calls to mind.

• A Needle Woman enacts the isolation we all feel by offering a resonant silence, contemplational in nature, in the midst of the crowd. Kim, who is not a practicing Buddhist, nevertheless sees Zen Buddhist affinities in her recent performances. Her art is suggestive of meditational mind in the encompassing awareness of its practice. She disavows her sense of herself in favor of a stance that heals and binds by taking in the energy, or noise, of the world. As Kim herself has said, "After a decade of sewing practice [since 1983], I came to see myself as a needle weaving the fabric of nature."

• The artist intends to bring together disparate parts of the real as an act of selflessness represented by the precise metaphor of needle and silk. Her silent, even prayerful, interactions with the amused, bemused crowds in eight cities show a tenacity of purpose as well as a self deliberately obliterated so as to take in, out of harm's way, the various responses her stillness and silence create. Video witnesses her activities, creating an archive of interactions. Interestingly, Kim sees the use of video, which documents her activities in different places, metaphorically as well: "Another encounter occurs when audiences see the video resulting from my performance. My body functions as a barometer, as a needle connecting people from a different time and space." She means to emphasize the ties that bind people, by extinguishing, for the duration of the performance, the illusion that the self is primary.

• Kim's epic eleven-day journey Cities on the Move — 2727 Kilometers Bottari Truck (November 1997) retraced sites in her memory; she traveled to different cities and villages where she used to live, carrying colorful bottari on a flat-bed truck. Kim considers the performance "a social sculpture, loaded with memory and history, which locates and then equalizes physical and mental space." The video, witnessing Kim's transit in Korea's Taebek Mountains, movingly and also literally presents the baggage she carries with her as she seeks to face her past. The performance presents her travels as a metaphor for the narrative of our existence; as Kim states in a catalogue accompanying the piece, "Bottari Truck is a processing object throughout space and time/locating and dislocating ourselves to the place/where we come from/and where we are going to." The figurative language engages the viewer on a metaphysical plane, demanding that we read her journey as emblematic of our own. Kim is particularly strong when her imagery is offered as a symbolic representation of awareness; the notion of moving along a path resonates in sympathy with the inevitable determination that the path will end when the person is gone. Asked in the catalogue to comment on unrealized projects, Kim replies, "I contain my projects in my body which I find as my studio, and I don't try to remember or describe them all." The statement returns us to the idea that Kim holds within her body a wellspring of creativity, which acts as the counterpart to the anonymous public self she so carefully presents. If it is true that we never see her face in her performance videos, it is because her anonymity is large enough to incorporate whatever occurs in the world around her.

• As one follows the steps left by Kim in her sojourns of memory, it becomes clear that the implications of her path — itself a Buddhist term — suggest deep affinities with Buddhism. Kim comments that her "attitude and way of looking are similar to that of Buddhists." At the same time, she reserves the right to remain "an independent individual, who looks at the world in one's own way and who recognizes that one's own path can sometimes meet with a broad stream of thought." In the isolation of her artwork, Kim seeks out a generalized correspondence with the world, but on her own terms and from her own experience. Her allegories are successful because they originate, despite seeming otherwise, from a highly individuated sense of purpose. In a way, Kim's anonymity is a subterfuge, a manner of relating a sense of self whose boundaries are so extended as to do away with the notions of limit entirely. The odd thing about Kim's isolation is that it in fact completely engages with her audience; just as she offers solitude as a way of emphasizing universal implications, so she underscores her autonomy as a way of proceeding toward a wide involvement with others. Indeed, her lonely actions appear to call for help — in the video A Beggar Woman, done in Lagos in 2001, she sits crosslegged, her palm extended for alms. Someone gives her some change, and the muteness of the scene intensifies the artist's vulnerability. We read the interaction as evidence of need everywhere; in her dramatization of want, Kim reduces herself — and us as well — to a egoless composite of desires, an enactment of utter poverty.

• As a result, Kim objectifies our intuitive knowledge in a language of actions stripped to the bare essence of their intent. There are of course feminist implications to her devotions, accomplished with a purposeful humility. In a remarkable performance, entitled A Needle Woman-Kitakyushu, done in 1999 in Japan, Kim stretched out on top of a limestone mountain, her curving body echoing the stony rise. The video confirms the artist's procedure, whereby her interaction with her surroundings envelops them in a unified will. The suggestion of the earth mother comes into play; there is a sense of limitless identification with nature. At the same time, some of the other performances have political implications, as suggested by A Beggar Woman or A Homeless Woman — Delhi (2000), in which Kim lies down on the sidewalk of a busy street. The lack of a direct message advocating social change does not affect the two pieces, which render suffering as intrinsic to our condition. Indeed, the indirectness of Kim's premises actually enhances her expression, which feels inevitable in light of its universality.

• In the recent installation A Mirror Woman (2002), Kim hung used bedcovers across the width of the Peter Blum Gallery in New York City. She also placed mirrored surfaces on both of the side walls, reflecting the path of visitors as they made their way through a labyrinth of colorful cloth. There was a sound element as well — the chants of Tibetan monks accompanied the exhibition. Overall, the experience of the piece was otherworldly to the point of being disturbing. Perhaps, in the largest sense, Kim's interventions are indeed disturbing, for they remind us of our mortality. In Epitaph (2002), Kim waves a bedcover in the midst of a cemetery in Greenpoint, Brooklyn; it is a moment that merges life with its apparent opponent, death. As such, the work suggests that the interpretation between existence and nonbeing may be forced; sometimes, a seeming dichotomy is actually two surfaces of a single idea. Kim's great strength as an artist is to find the moment wherein passion and calm, action and passivity, merge.

• She would have us understand that art is the great equalizer of false dualities; our mind is a place capable of including most everything. In the generosity of her vision, Kim reiterates the great truths of the unknown, what lies above and beyond our lives. She takes what we implicitly know and bestows upon it a public grace. As she grows larger in her art, so do we, so completely are we included in her generous expanse of her imagination.

• "The body itself is the most complicated bundle." — Kim Sooja

I. Sewing beyond space and time

• Since the 1980s, between thread and needle, Kim Sooja's work has been developing; from Korea to New York, via Paris and a number of other cities across the different continents, like an avowed metaphor of the act of sewing. But it is less a question of sewing as such than linking up and uniting fragments of varied realities that were previously disparate. From her first works, with pieces laid end to end and sewn together, like a sort of collage involving both hand, body and mind in relation to matter, up to the recent videos of A Needle Woman, where the artist herself becomes a needle and integrates into the urban fabric, sewing has been the guiding thread in a subtle research project from which a language has evolved, and where a unique commitment can be read, with references that are first of all local, but whose scope has become global.

• Over the course of time, Kim Sooja went from matter and the plane of the painting to the conquest of a liberating third dimension, and this allowed her to acquire greater mobility with the works entitled Bottari. In her videos and performances, her language subsequently became ever more economical, pursuing as though by incursion the possibility of the emergence of her oeuvre. The artist would like to be a needle that leaves no mark, that sews and disappears after closing the wound; after joining two bits of cloth, two continents or states of consciousness. Her discretion is consubstantial with her research, and her self-effacement facilitates revelation: to the appearance of the other, and to his presence. This path starts out from an approach to textiles, and a practice, that are rooted in Korean tradition but go beyond these local references through a language which is that of wandering, exchange and openness to the other, the unknown.

• Kim Sooja's training as a painter predisposed her to consider the plane surface of the canvas as a field of exploration. Her first compositions were formal, based on grids and interlinking motifs. She had a penchant for the art of the 20th-century avant-gardes, and notably Mondrian, both in her practice and in the theoretical spirit that informed all her work. But the physical dimension of her sewn canvases dominated her work. The very act of making a picture with pieces of fabric became predominant, and this opened the way to gestures that were simpler, though just as emblematic.

• Sewing thus became the essential element of her artistic process in the 1980s, to the point where it overshadowed pictorial considerations as such, and introduced the emotional charge that she had discovered while sewing by her mother's side. The act of sewing is one of intimacy, of withdrawing into oneself, close to symbiosis with a state of being that represents both tradition and family memory. This activity — almost passive, enthralling — locks the artist into a sequence of slow movements that repeat to infinity and are conducive to meditation. It is to be one with oneself, the fact of saturating oneself in one's own history. And the blankets made by Kim Sooja and her mother brought together two worlds that had previously been dissociated: the ancestral Korean tradition and her own pictorial quest.

• Kim Sooja's first works were an introspection turned towards herself, and a way of calling herself into question so as to become a totality. In this sense, the action she accomplished could be seen as the denouement of the self. Skein, bobbin or hank: the thread has to be unwound.

• The process begins with choosing pieces of cloth. To collect different textiles is to recompose one's being as one would reconstruct the fragments of a past: bits of individual stories that are becoming a new wholeness. The assemblage of these lacerations retains the marks and stigmata of the bodies that have borne them, with their dreams and daily sufferings. These recomposed entities become offerings, surrogates through which the memory of the other can act.

• To salvage materials, assemble them, and sew them together is an intoxicating, almost ecstatic act of patience and repetition (from immobility to rapture). By the monotony of the gesture, this process makes it possible, also, to create a void within oneself — a void which can become a plenitude. For Kim Sooja, a work like Portrait of Yourself (1990-1991) is a solitary confession, an incessant and infinite conversation with oneself. The process is as important as the result. The production of this particular work is something like a meditation, and if one approaches it with the required intimacy it becomes a mandala. Iso it is both a self-portrait and a profound expression, a communication of the artist's humours, which shows how she carried out an apprenticeship on herself, how she matured through experiencing the passage of time and stepping aside from its onward movement. Despite the repetition of a movement that could become tiresome, the artist claims to have derived a great deal of energy from the experience. Through it she renewed her resources, as is suggested by the title of a work dating from this period, Towards the Mother Earth (1990-1991).

• The back-and-forth movement of the needle through the material, from front to back, again and again, ended up by going beyond the plane surface, surreptitiously opening up towards a third dimension. Applying a reductionist logic to her work, Kim Sooja began covering objects with fabric, and thereby conquering space.

• At the beginning of the 1990s came the first constructions of this order (Untitled, 1991). Two hoops connected by rods made the shift from the line to the third dimension. These constructions were then enveloped in pieces of fabric as a way of freeing them from the wall (which indicated a transition in the oeuvre), and from the plane surface of the painting, without giving up the symbolic charge of the first sewn works. For a time, the artist moved away from the act of sewing, strictly speaking, and transposed her metaphor into the simple act of covering objects.

II. Enveloping memory

• Always seeking greater simplicity, Kim Sooja has rendered this emancipating act more radical still over the last decade, with works which now constitute, in a way, her signature: the bundles entitled Bottari.

• The first of these date from 1992. They were created in the Open Studio at the P.S.1 (a contemporary art centre in New York, now associated with MOMA), and came into being, according to the artist, spontaneously, unrelated to any particular consciousness of things. But though nothing anticipated the event, everything announced the simplification of the procedure that had already been set up, in the direction of its essence and its highest degree of efficacy, with the abolition of all artifice, accessory or substrate in favour of the fabric alone. Cloth became the content and the container of the work, its structure and its surface, inside and outside. The Bottari provided an aesthetic solution to the question of the surface by stepping outside it, with a structure which was both open and closed; which revealed and concealed at the same time.

• The bundle corresponds as much to a reference within the Korean tradition as to a universal metaphor of displacement, or even adventure, and a Bottari can hold all an individual's belongings. Originally, the custom was to use still-serviceable scraps of bright-coloured, precious silk from worn-out clothing, something of which was thus preserved.

• In Korea, fabrics are traditionally used for multiple common functions such as storing bedding and clothing, or moving it around, notably when it has to be washed, as well as transporting food, or even wrapping gifts. For Koreans, the Bottari is both intimate and familiar, and is used on a daily basis. It is a sign of time-honoured aesthetic refinement, and is often an object of great value. It carries a strong affective charge, and is passed down from generation to generation.

• It is symptomatic that Kim Sooja first explored the Bottari's possibilities while living outside Korea. She marked her return from her memorable stay at the P.S.1, where she had been a guest artist, with a Bottari installation in an abandoned house in Kyunju (1994). Bottari symbolize, in a way, the migrant who can put all his material goods in a bundle and be ready to set off at any moment. So when she came back and placed her bundles on a floor, Kim Sooja was reclaiming the space, but she was also indicating her readiness for an imminent departure. The inclination to travel is constant, or even necessary, when one has been elsewhere.

• The "elsewhere" through which the artist found herself confronted with another perception of woman remains implicit as an underlying theme in her work: the body is torn between the modern Western world and her Eastern ancestral universe. This ambivalence would be irreconcilable if travelling did not offer a possibility of agreement between two different universes, in their alternation.

• The resulting tension, which is latent in all her work, was laid bare by an installation, Deductive Object / Dedicated to my Neighbors, presented at Nagoya in 1996, where two forms amongst her productions were brought together in the exhibition space. For the first time, Kim Sooja made a contrast between the placing of the bundles and an arrangement of Korean bedspreads on the floor.

• These are often given as presents to accompany a bride's trousseau, and are one of a household's most treasured possessions. In their folds they silently attest to the history of the couple. The motifs are symbolic references and exhortations to a happy life full of love, children and health.

• Between the revelation of the bedspreads' symbolic motifs and the mystery of the bundles, with the precious contents that can be imagined, there is a tension which is all the stronger when one realizes the particular importance of the traditional bedspread in the Korean context; and it goes beyond a purely formal interpretation of the opposition between the flat surface of the bedspreads and the sculptural dimension of the bundles. The installation thus makes it possible to appreciate, simultaneously, the unveiling of a private life and the intensity of a retreat into oneself.

• The bedspread is a witness-object whose day-to-day contact everyone can feel, It accompanies love, sex, dreams, nightmares, childbirth... and finally, at the moment of death, it becomes a shroud. So this envelope is a sort of skin, carrying in its folds what could be considered as a sort of portrait of its owner(s). Folded onto itself as a Bottari, the bedspread gathers up intimate possessions and protects them from inquisitive eyes. Opened out, it gives itself up in its flatness, and suggests the dreams that are incorporated into its traditional motifs.

• In this sense, the Nagoya installation, so simple and pure in its expression, contained an entire mode of thinking about time, and the cycle of life and death. Later, exploiting the charged nature of such references, the artist used the bedspreads by themselves in various situations, as restaurant tablecloths and lines stretched out for washing to be hung on. With each installation, the visitor's participation is decisive, since it is up to him to activate the mechanism. In the case of a tablecloth, it is the actual use of the table by the visitor, in a museum restaurant, that makes the work exist. In the Korean context, this almost-reverse use of the bedspread as a tablecloth is of the order of the transgression, since tradition prohibits eating in the place where one sleeps. For the duration of a meal, the tablecloth is an integral part of the table companions' life. It is imprinted with the stains they leave, the traces of this slice of existence that it will have subtly transformed by its presence.

• As in most of Kim Sooja's other installations, the onlooker is thus a protagonist — a constitutive element of the space in question. When he moves around to look at the work from different viewpoints, it is renewed at each step. Pursuing this logic so as to extend it ever further, in a recent presentation of the Laundry installations at the Peter Blum gallery in New York, A Mirror Woman (2002) had mirrors on all the walls with lines stretched out for hanging up washing. The spectator's contemplation of the work was eroded by his discovery of himself in the mirrors, which projected the field of the work into an infinite space. This visual confrontation with oneself is a curious, singular fact in a work that is characterized rather by the inconspicuousness of the artist in the interest of internalized reflection. In general, when a figure appears in her work (and in her more recent videos it is often herself), it has its back turned, as if to suggest a presence, but not a particular individuality. This is the case, for example, in the video of her performance Cities on the Move - 2727 Kilometers.

• In November 1997, rejoining the nomadic life of contemporary artists, the better to in order to better reinforce it (but also enlarging the field of action of her work and its semantic purview), Kim Sooja decided to take her bundles on the road. She spent eleven days going round towns and other places in Korea that held specific memories for her. This meant that her bundles were loaded with new content: the memory of her past history and travels. In the filmed performance she is seen from behind, hieratic and impassive, sitting above firmly-attached Bottari in a truck driving through ever-changing scenery.

• The idea of moving around becomes a reality in this video, which combines, for the first time in such an obvious way, a sense of the intimate and with a public dimension. The artist's silhouette, in its sobriety and black clothes, unlike the Bottari with their vivid, varied colours, stands up straight, like a needle.

• The fact that she presents us only her back is a procedure that challenges us and thrusts us into the middle of the landscape. As in Caspar David Friedrich's romantic paintings, the silhouette of a back becomes our bodily referent, and we project onto it. This transfer gives extra substance to the work, and confers on it a shape for us, so that we become the subject. (The phenomenon is clearer still in the later videos of towns, which this performance adumbrates). Perched high up on the bundles, while the road goes by, the needle-woman both cuts through the landscape and sews it up again, the way a wound closes up. Finally, this Calvary of memory is a way for Kim Sooja to forge a link with her history and re-inject an emotional charge into her itinerary. So the Bottari that she takes round with her are phantoms of time gone by, to which this itinerary pays tribute. Each of them can be related to a person, and the journey takes on the character of a pilgrimage in honour of dear, loved beings.

• This dimension of personal ritual was transcended when the artist presented her Bottari Truck in major festivals of contemporary art. What was of the order of the intimate then took on a universal, even denunciatory dimension with regard to its context.

• She has taken part in the biennials which are the focal points of artistic nomadism: São Paulo (the 24th, in 1998), Venice (the 48th, in 1999), and Lyon (the 5th, in 2000). Arriving as in a bazaar upon which groups from different regions converge to exchange merchandise and cultures, the truck filled with Bottari of every colour accentuates the idea of displacement at the very moment when the international press is taking an interest in the situation of populations forced into exile across the world. But if Kim Sooja's installation can express displacement as a positive value, a search for a new paradise, it cannot cancel out the premises that any change of place is firstly seen as the breakup of a unity that has been lost forever. Displacement always implies cutting oneself off from one's birthplace and ancestral roots. There are voluntary exiles who have struck it lucky and found a better life. But deep in the soul of the uprooted person there is always a secret, persistent wound.

• The historical context of the Bottari Truck cannot fail to recall the atrocities committed at the time of its creation in the Balkans, Africa and the Near East (to mention only those that made the headlines).

• It is often never-ending struggles, and more rarely natural disasters, that force entire populations to pack up their bundles and set out from home, into the unknown. The Bottari, with their shimmering colours, convey all these paradoxical feelings, which are stirring memories but also as well as deep wounds.

III. The simultaneous elsewhere

• Following the thread of her wanderings, Kim Sooja's recent series of videos are both at once subtle in their poetry, strong in their presentation, and complex in their social implications. They are grouped together by generic title. A Needle Woman alludes to her desire to disappear like a needle in a haystack, but also to be the needle that insinuates itself into the urban fabric. These performances, and the ones that derive from them, like A Beggar Woman, were presented for the first time in a solo exhibition at P.S.1 in 2001.

• A Needle Woman (1999-2001) is a set of eight videos projected simultaneously on the four walls of a room. Each shows Kim Sooja from behind, dressed identically in the most neutral possible way, immobile, facing the human wave that is rushing round her in a busy street in one of the world's most populous cities: New York, Tokyo, London, Mexico City, Cairo, Delhi, Shanghai and Lagos.

• The artist transports us into cities in every continent by taking them into a place where we become active participants. The large-format projections bring us face to face with life-size people, justifying a total immersion in the space of the work. The artist's back — as we said above — allows us to pass through into the work, into the depths of metropolises, and to narrowly avoid the abyss. This illustrates, more or less, the Kantian definition of the sublime: to feel an emotion through the devices the artist offers us as she opens up her own experience so that we can enter into it without risk or peril. The unobtrusiveness of the artist, in spite of her presence, could produce a multitude of approaches in which individuality would give way to the essence of our own thinking.

• Kim Sooja's discretion eliminates every psychological aspect of the ordeal she has taken on. The whole point is what occurs around her, which appears as a catalyst. Taking our place in this installation, we realizse what is intimate and personal about the ordeal, for anyone who goes through it. Evidently the physical side of it begins with a meditation that leads to a sort of ecstasy. And in this sense, the artist, as an individual, is outside herself. She abstracts herself and becomes like a keyhole, or a negative image of herself, which makes perception possible for us.

• Her interest in the elsewhere makes her central to the generation of migratory artists who, at the dawn of the new millenium, are questioning the limits of globalization. As an artist, she is invited to present her work in cultural institutions around the globe, while the art world has gone beyond the rich countries — where there are people who take an interest in such creative activity — to include less favoured countries. The result is that artistic discourse is becomes enriched by other voices, and the circulation of works finds new perspectives.

• The simultaneity of her presence in these no more than a hunch: distant though they are from one another, and different as the historical and economic contexts may be, apart from their urbanistic and architectural characteristics, these cities are alike in the steady streams of individuals people going about their business, moving towards an inevitable meeting with their destiny. And so a continuum of races and peoples finds itself virtually at the center of the space. Simultaneity of presentation makes the common features of the beings in movement in these eight videos obvious at a glance. Only an attentive eye will be able to discern what differentiates them.

• While the time of the work is acting on us, our body replaces that of the artist, and becomes the needle that leads the guiding thread. A Needle Woman, as Kim Sooja likes to define herself, weaves, as much as she rends, the urban fabric. The fine needle pierces the world, but the whole universe passes through the eye of the needle. In certain contexts, in spite of her self-effacement, the artist cannot escape her otherness: she is the foreigner, the observer, the element that can split apart as well as bind together. In fact she cuts the human flow, which has to pass around her, avoid her like an obstacle, open up before her. The specificity of each particular population appears in this encounter. And the encounter is the indicator of the specificity.

• The characteristics of towns come out through contrast, according to what opposes them. Each possesses a distinct rhythm that is demonstrated by the perfect immobility of the artist as an immutable reference. Her proper time seems to be in suspension, while the rest of the town swirls round her. Kim Sooja's passivity is a source of worry and tension. One expects something to happen: an intrusion, something violent... Possible violence, like a specter haunting life in these metropolises at every moment.

• The reactions of the passers-by (or their total absence of reaction) are archetypes of the imaginative profile that a given city suggests. And thus, without wanting to paint a sociological portrait, the videos comprise a number of elements that make it possible to characterize the people and their surroundings: their clothes, their way of occupying the street, their attitude in urban space... For example, passers-by in New York, London and Tokyo are distinguished by their rapid, determined gait. They have an objective, and their walk is a "power walk": they are efficacious, and scarcely notice the artist's presence. They have an individual goal, outside the range of the camera, in the direction of a horizon that protects them and immunizes them against everything that could deflect them from their path. Their life is traced out, and there is no place for the unexpected. The street is only a vector, and not a place of sociability.

• In these cosmopolitan cities, all racial differences seem to fade. The artist goes almost unnoticed, and her features do not mark her out in places where there are people of all origins, and where hybrids are common. Modernity asserts itself here as an exacerbation of individuality, a sort of autism that tends towards homogeneity. Such cities are so full of stimuli and diverse fantasies that the intervention of an artist attracts little attention.

• In places like Cairo, Delhi, Mexico, and especially Lagos, on the other hand, there is a tension between the modern and the traditional which means that existence is highly charged. The individual finds his full dimensions in an open space where he is attentive to those around him, because he seeks to evaluate his position and rank in the immense gamut of social classes and traditional hierarchies that are an essential part of these cultures.

• The members of different castes and social classes mix in the street. They are wary of one another; they keep an eye on one another and expose themselves to situations in which there is always tension. Here, the street becomes a place of both coexistence and distinctions.

• In these cities where the contrasts are strong, individuals want to assert themselves across the cleavages. They look at one another so as to make comparisons between one another, and every look contains a question (Am I from the same class or not? How am I to position myself, and where, in such a wide spectrum?); so it is not surprising that these are the cities where the immobile presence of Kim Sooja gets garners the most reactions. They are still preserved from blasé mundanity, and the artist stands out more strongly as a stranger. But it is above all her passivity and her determination to abstract herself that arouse curiosity, along with a desire to make her react, to draw her out of herself, so as to bring her back to everyday life and the flux of the community. In all these cities, it is the ever-present children who are the least hesitant about teasing the artist and turning her performance into a game.

• The virtual meeting-point of eight streets in a unique space plunges us into the improbable river of the human continuum. Engulfed in the multitude, the artist is invisible, as she often aspires to being. This takes her work beyond the nature-culture cleavage, or the opposition of the contemporary urban to original nature. In natural settings, as in the performance A Needle Woman / Kitakyushu (1999), where she is stretched out on a rock, or in A Laundry Woman / Yamuna River, India (2000), where she is facing the river in question, she strives for the same contemplative detachment as in urban settings. Perhaps her deepest desire is to reconcile perfect immobility and perpetual motion. And is this not what she seems to be seeking when she indicates her wish to disappear for an entire month, as she dreamt of doing during the last Whitney Biennial? Is there not a paradox in the fact of wanting to be simultaneously everywhere and nowhere?

• Kim Sooja embodies the complexity of the kind of globalization which both proclaims and denies the local spirit. Her work with textiles had a specificity that was linked to the Korean context of her origins. This opened up in the course of her peregrinations, gaining in breadth without cutting itself off from its roots, or disowning them. Her videos combine nature and the urban, the individual and the collective, the global and the local. The richness of her approach, in its discretion and subtlety, lies no doubt in her unique way of transcending divisions and resolving them in works that place the spectator at the heart of an extreme questioning process, which for each individual becomes personal and intimate.

• The trace of a body. Not long ago, maybe just a while ago, there was a body here. It lived in a rhythm of everyday behaviour and actions, shaping the values and sense requisite to the existence of the objects surrounding it; clothes above all, the obvious, but usually trivialized signs of life, which remain in the body's place, in the place vacated by it, empty and useless. The independent existence of clothes, alongside the body's life, begins at birth, starting with little baby clothes and moving on to bigger and bigger ones. Clothes — there are always some bodies putting them on, wearing them, desiring them, striving to get them, taking possession of them, discarding, storing, inheriting. Nearly all their life bodies never part with what clothes, adorns and protects them, what is closest to them, next to the skin, what absorbs its smell, grime and sweat.

• The objects left by the body, the clothes saturated with its physicality — are they not the most obvious and tangible traces of its reality, the proof of its existence? Is the material world coexisting with the body not its most faithful memory? The sense of this world disappears with the passing of a particular life, although it can be reborn with the life of new bodies. One moment, a freeze frame of the stream of life changes forever the state of the subject and object. It is maybe the most strongly felt — physically and psychically — end of the stream of the time of life, flowing in between, in space and time..

• Kim Sooja: "We are wrapped in cotton cloth at birth, we wear it until we die, and we are again wrapped in it for burial. Especially in Korea, we use cloth as a symbolic material on important occasions such as coming of age ceremonies, weddings, funerals, and rites for ancestors. Therefore cloth is thought to be more than a material, being identified with the body - that is, as a container for the spirit. When a person dies, his family burns the clothes and sheets he used. This may have the symbolic meaning of sending his body and spirit to the sky, the world of the sky, the world of the unknown."

• Scattered clothes and bottari, bundles stuffed with clothes, made of traditional Korean fabrics, are spread on the ground in a forest during the First Biennial in Kwangju in 1995. This installation, made of 2.5 tonnes of second-hand clothes and entitled Sewing into Walking was dedicated by Kim Sooja to the victims of the suppression of a democratic protest in Kwangju in 1980. The tragedy of those victims was expressed by an installation made of a mass of used clothes, those most obvious signs of the presence of a body.

• Kim Sooja, e-mail, April 1, 2003:

• The Kwangju Massacre happened in the 1980 and hundreds of people died for their democracy movement. When I was invited from Kwangju, I couldn't do anything before I commemorate their lives...

• Deductive Object-dedicated to my neighbours was done in 1996 when the department store was completely collapsed and killed hundreds of people and I was in that building with my son 30 mins before collapse, and we used to live in the same block. I had to comment and commemorate the victims of my neighbours especially when I had an occasion to install my piece in Japan which had a lot to do with Korea in the history (war, colonization, conflict ...). So the neighbour means both my own neighbour in Seoul but also Korea-Japan relationship, so I mixed the Korean used clothes with Japanese.

• Kwangju, Seoul and Kosovo are just a few of the many places in the world which have been marked forever by the death of many beings. Kim Sooja sees it, but she does not get involved in political conflicts. So when she presents Bottari Truck — in Exile, a truck loaded with colourful bottari, at the Venice biennial and dedicates that event to the [victims of] the war going on at the same time in Kosovo (so close to Venice), that gesture is just an expression of concern for the lot of other people.

• Kim Sooja conceptualizes political events through installations in which an important element are bottari and traditional Korean bedcovers, objects strongly associated with women and the roles they play (in Korea considerably limited by Confucianism). Another key element of the installation are used clothes, which in Korean tradition are carriers of the spiritual element, and in Kim Sooja's works also become a representation of the human body. Those are, it seems, the only three projects with implied political, social and emotional meanings; all the others are creative acts made concrete as objects, installations, performances and videos; recently, those are becoming increasingly minimalist. An attitude of conscious "inaction" is articulated ever more plainly in the performances realized and registered on video in different places around the world and shown in exhibition rooms.

• In an essay published in this catalogue Adam Szymczyk proposes a new interpretation of the artist's work. Giving descriptions of journalist's reports of the war in Iraq, he confronts Kim's quiet presence with the media clamour accompanying the current political situation in the world. Kim Sooja's media personality is radically different from the way the media operate. In her video performances she shows her body, but remains silent and conceals her face, turning away from the viewers. She seems to be protesting against the noise made by the media and against all acts directed against human beings, including accidental tragedies (such as the collapse of the supermarket in Seoul), expressing her opposition to the pain and suffering accumulated in the clothes.

• Kim Sooja consciously cultivates this attitude by a contemplative perception of the world and a rejection of excess information (e.g. deciding not to read books). She is a nomadic artist, constantly on the move, but she seems to stand firmly on the ground. In fact, her attitude may be interpreted, in a simplified way, as a practical exemplification of Heidegger's being-in-the-world, an existence cast into the world, but conscious of its "spatiality"; concerned, but not frightened; a being open to cognition and "the world's worldliness"; a being which accepts other "beings".

• Kim Sooja: "When I look back over my more than twenty years of handling bedcovers, I feel that I have always been performing, guided by the piles of cloth I haved live among. What in the world have I stitched and patched. What have I tied up in bundles. When will the journey of my needle end, my silkworm unwrap its flesh. Will it in the end slough off its skin. Will the boundless with no destinations find theirs ways to go."

• Looking at the twenty years of Kim Sooja's work we can see that they form a consistent process. After art studies in Seoul, until about 1992, Kim Sooja makes abstract collage using traditional Korean fabrics and clothes. She combines sewing as a technique with drawing and painting. In those pieces sewing becomes not only a direct way of creating form, but a constitutive element defining her work. The use of this unique technique, associated rather with gender art, women's art, is blends with the artist's personal experience, taken from her family home, of sewing the traditional bedspreads together with her mother and grandmother. She sews her first objects from inherited clothes and bedspreads.

• Kim Sooja's early collages come in different geometrical shapes, as flat reliefs, their surfaces made of bits of fabric sewn together, painted in ink or covered with abstract drawings — The Earth and the Heaven (1984), Blue (1987), Black (1987). In the 1990s they are gradually transformed into three-dimensional objects, assemblages, which, although they can be hung like paintings, have a richer texture, as they consist of larger pieces of cloth, creased, draped in a baroque fashion, fastened to the base. They form a crumpled, crammed, multicoloured mass, suggestive of an abstract flower (Toward the Flower, 1992), of earth, (Toward the Mother Earth, 1990-1991), of a portrait (Portrait, 1991), or carrying even more metaphorical meanings (Mind and the World, 1991). Some of them are objects leaning against the wall or propped up with bamboo sticks. As such, they already belong to the genre of installation — between the reality of a two-dimensional wall and space.

• At the same time, from about 1991 Kim Sooja starts creating spatial objects and installations, leaving the painting and more or less flat textile compositions almost entirely behind. Those new compositions feature ready-made objects, always covered, wrapped up, rolled up in cloth (among others, a ladder, part of a rowing boat, a table, some tools and many old-fashioned objects of everyday use, which the artist treats with nostalgia, as the most precious traces of life and also as beautiful forms.) A series of those objects is called Deductive Object; it was afterwards expanded to include spatial objects made solely of fabrics. Needles, cloth, threads, sewing, sewing together, wrapping, covering, unfolding and spreading define Kim Sooja's artistic activities.

• Kim Sooja, e-mail, April 2, 2003

• "Korean traditional wrapping cloth is 'Bojagi'( I prefer to use this way although people used to call it Pojagi - now Koreans try to match with the actual pronunciation of (Po)jagi and (Bo)ttari is same letter and pronunciation in Korea. Bojagi is traditionally used as wrapping cloth which was made out of small pieces of cloth sawn by anonymous women. But I used only used bedcovers which are made for the newly married couples.

• 'Bottari' is a wrapped bundle but normally people wrap households, cloth, clothes, books, gifts,...whatever, but my bundle is wrapped used clothes from anonymous people — I used yellow pages and white pages from New York in 1993 before I leave NYC as if wrapping people in New York."

• A turning point in Kim Sooja's work was her exhibition in P.S. 1 Studio in New York in 1992. There, beside earlier work, she presented bottari made of traditional Korean bedspreads, filled with clothes. She also exhibited pictures, assemblage and even a kind of "tableau" made of crumpled fabrics, stuck to a surface and partly extending beyond the frame, as if pulled out of the inside of the picture. It was through those objects that a symbolic disruption of frames was effected. A year later at the Ise Art Foundation in New York Kim Sooja shows only a massive bottari, provocative not only in its shape, but also through the intensive red of the rectangular piece of fabric.

• In the early 1990s Kim Sooja departs completely from the closed form of "tableau" with its limitations, and devotes herself to multi-directional exploration of space. The group exhibition "In Their Own Images" at the P.S.1 Museum in New York (1994) marks the starting point of Kim Sooja's new experiment with the "spatiality" and intimacy of a wall. Deductive Object — scraps of cloth filling cracks in a wall — is used by her at the 5th Biennial in Istanbul in 1997. While at the P.S.1 Museum colourful bits of fabrics protruded blithely beyond the wall, in Istanbul the blend discreetly with the old walls of the Hagia Eireni museum, becoming no more than patches of colour, hardly visible in the arcaded corridor. The association between those scraps stuck in the cracks of a wall with the Wailing Wall in Jerusalem is rather obvious.

• Since the exhibitions at the P.S.1 Studio (1992) and the ISE Art Foundation (1993) Kim Sooja increasingly often exhibits bottari entitled Deductive Object, arranging them in different ways: a solitary bottari in a gallery (Museum Fridericianum, Kasel, 1998), one combined with bedcovers spread on the floor (Akira Ikeda Gallery, Nagoya, 1996 and the 5th Biennial in Lyon, 2000); crammed (Kwanhoon Gallery, Seoul, 1994), or against the background of a landscape, where they evoke their basic function: a practical means of transporting the most necessary things or one's all belongings, thus becoming a symbol of nomadism (Yongyou, Korea, 1995), and finally in combination with a video installation at the Seomi Gallery in Seoul (1994), consisting of bottari, monitors and scattered clothes. It was that installation, entitled Sewing into Walking, that anticipated the one dedicated to the victims of the Kwangju Massacre.

• Apart form bottari, the most important thing are the traditional Korean bedspreads — to the artist, symbols of woman, of sex, love, the body at rest, sleep, privacy, fertility, longevity and health. They can also be interpreted as a special kind of traces of life. They are used fabrics — extraordinary witnesses of life, birth and death. At the artist's second individual exhibition at the Hyunday Gallery (1991) a single one of those is hung, together with old, sentimental objects. Then we encounter a whole mass of them, forming a patch of colourful fabrics. Long before, Sooja ties them into bottari, spreads them on the grass with deliberately slow gestures (performance Sewing into Walking, 1994). In recent years, they most often appear in installations such as A Laundry Woman, a simple presentation of a number of cloths hung out in the gallery to resemble drying linen. Is that not a metaphor for the roles of woman in Korean society, and women's roles in general? All the time Kim Sooja imitates women's activities in spare, minimalist gestures: she spreads, ties, folds, hangs out.

• In November 1997 Kim Sooja takes an 11-day performance-trip around Korea in a truck. The 33-minute video from that trip is a record of the views of the truck with its load of colourful bottari. Possibly, Kim Sooja is making a journey into the past, going back to the journeys which her family was obliged to embark on following her father, an Army man working in the demilitarized zone. At the same time it is a metaphor for her current life — the life of a nomad artist, crossing ever new borders in order to meet new people. That aspect of nomadism, shown in Kim Sooja's performances, in installations using the symbolic bottari and in videos, is one of the key points of her art. Such nomadism takes place in open spaces and needs them to come into being, although it is confronted with the horizontal plan of the world and the limitations imposed by the organization of space by the "state".

• Kim Sooja's videos are a record of performances happening in various cities and places around the world. Kim appears in them with her back to the camera. She is the woman who stands among passers-by or lies on a rock in Kitakyushu (A Needle Woman); the woman who sits on the pavement and begs in Cairo and Mexico (A Beggar Woman); the woman lying in the street in Delhi and Cairo (A Homeless Woman) and standing by the river in Delhi (A Laundry Woman).

• As a figure against the background of the filmed spaces and people she is clearly distinct from their rhythm, their movement, their image. That is an effect of the medium of communication — video, which produces a flat and illusion-like picture. It is also due to the artist taking on the role of the "other" or even "stranger", and the position of the motionless figure — in the foreground — further prevents her from integrating with the surroundings. There is no sound from the crowded streets and the landscapes in which we see Kim Sooja; she reduces the reception to pure vision. We do not know who's filming her; if it were not for the artist's figure in the centre of the picture, it could be perceived as the record of an anonymous security camera, continuously controlling the streets, filming live with no scenario. All the passers-by, inhabitants of great cities, are filmed and become unwitting actors.

• In the video A Needle Woman (1999-2001) the artist stands in crowded streets. Her complete immobility contrasts with the movement and noise of the metropolis, but the noise we can only guess at. The camera films the masses of bodies making their way along the streets of London, Tokyo, Shanghai, Lagos, New York, Cairo, Mexico City, Delhi. In Tokyo, the crowd does not get thinner even during the sultry summer. It moves smoothly, pattering and shuffling in a characteristic Japanese way. In the evenings, what sounds like one huge conversation hovers over the city, intermingled with street sounds.

• In Kim Sooja's video, however, we will not hear Tokyo. In this, as in other films, instead of the sounds and the artist's face, we are shown her body and the face of the anonymous crowd. Thousands of people walk towards her, enter the frame and disappear after a moment. The video takes on the role of a sociologist's record — it shows the reactions of the crowd in confrontation with "another". In London, New York and Mexico City that crowd passes Kim Sooja ignoring her almost entirely. Similarly in Tokyo — here the indifference is greatest (no wonder many street performances were held here, for example by the group HiRed Center, to "activate" the street and the crowd). In Shanghai, Delhi and Cairo the crowd shows more interest; sometimes somebody turns, or stops for a while to stare. It is in Lagos that Kim Sooja arouses the greatest curiosity. Freeze frames from the video show not a crowd, but individual faces, feelings, reactions. In Tokyo, a smiling Japanese woman's face appearing for a moment is the only instance of emotion in the anonymous crowd. In Cairo the camera registers little events: somebody meets somebody, there is a warm greeting etc. Those are the most fascinating observations that Kim Sooja presents us with. On the other hand, it is well known what hostility and aggression a "crowd" can show: against itself as a whole, but also against the individuals that constitute it. Those video records and the artist's attitude express a sort of protest and something that stems from her affirmation of the world and total "being-in-the-world". There is also something innocent and naïve about them, and certainly something brave. Kim Sooja may not pose the question, but it would be difficult not to ask ourselves: why do stranger bodies incite so much hatred in us?

• In A Beggar Woman Sooja begs on the streets of Lagos, Cairo, Mexico. In Cairo, two issues coincide: the problem of gender and of cultural differences. Kim — a woman, an "other" is surrounded solely by men, younger and older; a crowd of them encircle her body so that at times the motionless figure is no longer visible. In A Homeless Woman, shot in Delhi and Cairo, it is in Cairo that the homeless woman excites greatest interests. A group of men can not restrain their curiosity: they talk, they stare, even directly into the camera.

• Kim Sooja makes her presence in the world noticeable through the continuity of repeated situations and shots of her own unchanging image: a figure standing among people or against a natural background. People bring in their own physicality and materiality into her works, and so does nature. It is a manifestation of various ways of being in the world. In that way Kim Sooja points to the basic problems of existence: that we are always alone, but also, that we always have the world and people around us.

• Flaminia Generi Santori
  In your work you have been using very consistently two media: fabrics and video. The most immediate connection one makes comes out from the title of one of your video works: the series Needle woman. Who is the needle woman? Is she a metaphor? Does she represents a condition of humanity, as the title of your show in Lyon would suggest? And what is the relationship between the needle woman and the fabrics use have been using?

• Kimsooja
  The fabrics I've been using for my sewn work, Object, and installation were used Korean traditional costumes, bedcovers and used clothes which I found from anonymous people. These fabrics represent presence of body whose smell, memory and time is still there. On the other hand, a series of my video pieces represent and wrap the actual human body in immaterial way, while the fabric installations are materialistic way of representing and wrapping human body — yet it represents the invisible body.

• In my recent video performance A Needle Woman (1999-2001), my body stands as a medium between the viewers of the video and the people in the street where my performance is taking place, as if it functions as a barometer while weaving/woven (by) different nation, races, culture, society and economy by standing still in the middle of the busy streets in 8 different metropolitans in the world.

• Apart from A Needle Woman video, I've been also examining the conditions of human being by putting myself in one of the lowest state of human being as A Homeless Woman, A Beggar Woman, A Laundry Woman and as a refugee by making Bottari installations — refugee as a persona, as a woman, and as a collective group of people in a broad sense of refugee in existential, social, cultural, and political context.

• Flaminia Generi Santori
  The needle woman might take different positions, like in Needle Woman - Kitayashu, in which she lies on a rock facing the sky perfectly still. Or she might take different names, like in Laundry Woman, where, in the same position, she faces the Yamuna river in Delhi...

• Kimsooja
  As I mentioned earlier, the Needle Woman signifies a medium which connects different parts of the fabrics of society, culture and landscape — in that sense, A Needle Woman - Kitakyshu divides and links four different element of the world which are the earth and the sky, the human side and that of the nature. As long as my body functions as a mediator, A Laundry Woman is not different from the other performances although the position is different depending on the structure of the landscape and cityscapes. But I could say my work has also a parallel relationship to the structure of the painting in formalistic reading.

• Flaminia Generi Santori
  In these works you stand perfectly still, in crowded cities in different parts of the world, or in the landscape. Watching them one cannot but think about how you managed to reach such an immobility and concentration. And also they made me think about the goal of so many meditation practices: the ability to live the present moment to its ultimate intensity, or the notion of impermanence. However you said that zen theory has not been important in your work...

• Kimsooja
  Immobility comes out of mobility. I could reach to the immobility only by practicing mobility in my life. I was always thinking every moment is a meditation and the moment when a perception and an artistic decision comes up to my mind was Zen, but I'd never practiced Zen meditation.

• Flaminia Generi Santori
  In all of your video installations the viewer is faced with your back, so that he shares your point of view. In Needle Woman the viewer is immersed in a 8 channels installation in which he witnesses you standing still in the middle of the most crowded streets of the world. Do you imagine the viewers standing on your back when you do your video performances? What kind of visual and emotional experience you project on your viewers?

• Kimsooja
  It would have been very interesting if someone on the street stood right behind me posing exactly the same way I do. I would say the person who is standing behind me is the camera which is eyes of myself. This idea can be compared to my video I made in a crowed street in Istanbul in 1997 which takes people coming and going in Istiklal street by setting a fixed frame for an hour wrapping people into the camera lens which can be juxtaposed to my body.

• Flaminia Generi Santori
  Time, it seems to me, is a crucial element in your work. Not only because of the duration of the videos but also because in all of them you watch transient elements: people in the streets, clouds in the sky or flowers in the river. Time and past experiences seem to be crucial also in your work with fabrics in which you use tissues which have been used already and carry with them the sign of past experiences.

• Kimsooja
  The idea of impermanency of existences gives me a deep compassion for human being and has been embedded in my work since the beginning of my sewing practice till now — the fabrics I first sewn together were the remained fragments from my grandmother's clothes when she passed away — memorizing her presence. I've been living such mobile life from my childhood wrapping and unwrapping household and luggage and the strong memory I have from my childhood were the huge mountain in front which I was looking in the dark from our house yard and the passing by landscapes I used to see on our way to somewhere else from a bus or a train. Leaving people behind us from where I live and meeting new people in a strange city was part of my family life.

• Flaminia Generi Santori
  You have been using the fabrics in a variety of contexts and often in public places, like in a old post office in Trieste (am I right?) and in the open air cafè in Central Park New York. You also took them, as Bottari, to different parts of the world in a work eventually dedicated to the Kosovo refugees. What is the relation, if there is, between private memory and public place, function and aesthetics?

• Kimsooja
  Presenting private materials in public spaces sometimes provokes intimate questions such as table cloths and laundry installation I made with newly married couple's bedcover cloth from Korea. Eating in the bed, or Wrapping bundle/Bottari ( especially when it's refered to a woman) are Taboo in Korea. I am questioning this site of birth, sleep, love, suffer, and death considering as our frame of life and its reality in sexuality, morality, conflicts in humanity as well as its impermanency. On the contrary, the color and embroideries of those fabrics are brilliant and beautiful, while showing contradiction in reality of life which is not always same as these symbols signify and the esthetic structures I present in situ.

• Flaminia Generi Santori
  Lately you have been working with lights and sound, like in Charleston or like in a lighted mandala you showed in Lyon. Is this a new direction in your work?

• Kimsooja
  A permanent question and desire I have has a lot to do with possession and its void in Yin and Yang relationship in our world. The whole process of my work has to do with process of void in life and art and its extinguishment at the end.

• Mary Jane Jacob
  Let's talk about how sewing has been a contemplative practice for you and a way of connecting your body to a greater whole?

• Kimsooja
  One day in 1983, I was sewing a bedcover with my mother and then at the very moment when I passed the needle through the fabric's surface, I had a sensation like an electric shock, the energy of my body channeled through the needle, seeming to connect to the energy of the world. From that moment, I understood the power of sewing: the relationship of needle to fabric is like my body to the universe, and the fundamental relationship of things and structure were in it. From this experience, for about ten years, I worked with cloth and clothes, sewing and wrapping them, processes shared with contemplation and healing. By 1992, I started making bundles or bottari in Korean — I always used old clothes and traditional Korean bedcovers — that retain the smells of other's lives, memories, and histories, though their bodies are no longer there — embracing and protecting people, celebrating their lives and creating a network of existences.

• Mary Jane Jacob
  Korea was not a very visible part of the contemporary art world. You yourself came to the U.S. in 1992 on a residency at P.S. 1 in New York. Then Korea joined the ranks of international biennale presenters in the southwestern city of Kwangju, a place where Korean and American identity is sadly linked.

• [In May 1980 students and other demonstrators against martial law were killed by government forces with brutal force, the death toll mounting to 2000, though officials claim only 191. The U.S. was implicated in support of President Chun who seized power in a military junta and a wave of botched diplomatic that followed.]

• Kimsooja
  This is the site of a national tragedy. It is marked by anniversary reenactments each year. With my work for the first biennale there, Sewing into Walking: Dedicated to the Victims of Kwangju, I placed 2.5 tons of clothes in bundles on a mountainside at the Biennale site. It was the image of the sacrificed bodies. People could walk on them, listening to the "Imagine" song by John Lennon which, through the audiences' bodies, evoked the confrontation of stepping on bodies and guilty conscience, as well as memorializing the victims' lives. Over the two months of the show, the seasons changed and the clothes became mixed with the soil, rain, and fallen leaves, becoming like dead bodies: this was the installation scene I wished to create for the viewers. The audience — the Korean people — opened the bundles and removed nearly one ton of clothes; they hung some onto the trees and took others away with them.

• Mary Jane Jacob
  Have your works, as a means of healing and connecting, been autobiographical?

• Kimsooja
  When I went back to Korea in 1993, after spending time in the U.S. and having a different perspective on my own culture and gender roles in Korean life, I re-confronted the society as a woman and a woman artist. I started realizing my own personal history in bottari projects, using them more as real bottari than for an aesthetic context. My first video performance piece, Sewing into Walking-kyung ju (1994), resulted from an installation; in its documentation I recognized that my own body was a sewing tool, a needle that invisibly wraps, weaves, and sews different fabrics and people together in nature. For my next video performance, Cities on the Move — 2727 Kilometers Bottari Truck in 1997, I made an eleven-day journey throughout Korea atop a truck loaded with bottaris, visiting cities and villages where I used to live and have memories. Because the bottari truck is constantly moving around and through this geography, viewers question the location of my body: my body — which is just another bottari on the move — is in the present, is tracing the past and, at the same time, is heading for the future, non-stop movement by sitting still on the truck. And though I used myself in this work, I tried to locate a more universal point where time and space coincide.

• I realize now that Cities on the Move — 2727 Kilometers Bottari Truck emerged from the history of my family that moved from one place to another almost every two years, mostly near the DMZ area, because of my father's job in the military. We were wrapping and unwrapping bundles all the time; we were endlessly in a new environment, leaving people whom we loved behind and meeting new neighbors, as we passed from one city to another, one village to another. We were, in fact, nomads, and I am continuing the nomadic life as an artist, a condition which has become one of the main issues in contemporary art and society. Yet I am also aware that migration is just an extension of nature and we are literally in a state of migration at every moment.

• Mary Jane Jacob
  It seems like sites — out in the world — have become your studio for making art?

• Kimsooja
  Usually, I don't like to make or create anything in nature because I am really afraid of damaging it. Instead, I decided to use existing elements which can be related to my idea of location/dislocation and its gravity and energy towards the future. In 1997 I did another work in the series, Sewing into Walking-Istiklal Cadessi, a video shoot in Istanbul. I experimented with documenting peoples' coming and going through the fixed frame of the lens; it was an invisible way of sewing and wrapping people. Then, with A Needle Woman project (1999-2001), I inserted myself in the middle of the busy street and looked towards the people of eight different metropolises in the world: Tokyo, Shanghai, Berlin, New York, Mexico City, Cairo, Lagos, and London. I considered my body to be a needle that weaves different people, societies, and cultures together by just standing still. Inverting the notion of performing and remaining fixed within the crowd, my body functioned like a barometer, showing more by doing nothing. The needle is an evident yet ambiguous tool, androgynous, maintaining contradiction within it. The needle functions only as a medium; it never remains at the site and disappears at the end. It just leaves traces, connecting or healing things.

• Each performance lasted 25-30 minutes, during which I just stared straight ahead. I eventually cut each tape to an unedited section 6-minutes and 30-second in length. In the beginning I had a difficulty resisting all the energies from people coming at me. By the middle of the performance I was centered and focused, and could become liberated from them. In the beginning my body was very, very intense, but in the end I was just smiling, liberated from all attention. I could see the light coming from the back, far from the front, over these waves of people. I was in complete enlightenment.

• I didn't know where the smile came from but I was just smiling. Maybe it was the moment when I was freed from my self-consciousness and engaged with the whole picture of the world and people as oneness and totality beyond this stream or ocean of people in the street. I think enlightenment can be gained by seeing reality as it is, as a whole which is a harmonious state within contradiction that requires no more intentional adjustment or healing.

• Mary Jane Jacob
  Your personal posture as well as the overall stance of your art, seems to aim to profoundly communicate experience. So while we do not have your experience as it was in the real time of making the video, it is still more than our experience of an artwork; you become this portal through which we pass to have our own experience in real time. At the same time you are a conduit for others' experience, the needle through which they pass, the empathetic locus. And like Buddhism, these works are about relationality, not just of human beings but among all beings and with nature.

• Kimsooja
  I did another performance called A Needle Woman at Kitakishu in Japan, laying down my body on a limestone mountain, the front of my body away from the viewer. Nothing changes in this video except the natural light from the sky and a little bit of breeze, and at the end there is one fly that is just passing by against the slow movement of the clouds. Of course, I had to control my breath, so my shoulders wouldn't move; I taught myself how to breathe with my stomach. I was there a pretty long time. The rock was a little bit cold, but it was just so peaceful. I was completely abandoning my will and desire to nature and I was at such a peace. There is one face of nature that caresses the human being in the most harmless way. So we feel at absolute peace in this mild nature. Of course, when it becomes harmful, nothing can compete with its absolute damage.

• In a way this work looks a little bit like the reclining Buddha, parinirvana; but, abandoning my ego, at the same time, in a different way, I consider it as a form of crucifix. My body is located at the central point of four different elements which are in-between the sky and the earth, nature and human beings. I located myself on the borderline of the earth and the sky, facing nature and away from the viewers. In the beginning of the video I think my body looks fragile and dramatic, feminine and provocative: an organic body or a body of desire. Over time, I find that my body, with its duration of stillness — breathing in the rhythm of nature — becomes a part of nature as matter itself, neutral, a transcendent state. To me it is like offering and serving my body to nature.

• Mary Jane Jacob
  Has performance become an actual practice of meditation for you, focusing and centering, to attain something for you, perhaps enlightenment, as well as give an experience to the viewer?

• Kimsooja
  For me, the most important thing (to arise out of) these performances is my own experience of self, and awakenness, rather than the video as an artwork. That's how I continue to ask deeper questions to the world and to myself. That is the enlightenment I encounter while doing this kind of performance. One such experience occurred with A Laundry Woman — Yamuna River, India (2000) I was just looking at some different locations for a performance, but when I passed by this riverside, I immediately felt the energy and decided, “Let's do it.” Again I put my back to the viewer and looked to the river. It was right next to the cremation place on the Yamuna, so the floating images on the surface of the river were all flowers and debris from cremations. While I was facing the river, I was actually looking at anonymous people's life and death, including mine. It was a purifying experience, praying and celebrating. There's a lot of detail on the surface of the river, so I consider this piece as a painting. It's all reflection: there is no sky, but it looks like sky; there are no real birds passing, only reflections of birds from above. So, in a way, the river functions as a mirror of reality.

• I decided to be there until the limit of my body. I was there for almost an hour in total. In the middle of standing there, I was completely confused: is it the river that is moving, or myself? My sense of time and space were turned completely upside-down. I was asking and asking and asking again, is it the river or myself? I finally realized that it is river that is changing all the time in front of this still body, but it is my body that will be changed and vanish very soon, while the river will remain there, moving slowly, as it is now. In other words, the changing of our body into a state of death is like floating on the big stream of river of the universe. Doing this performance gave me an important awakenness. It suddenly reminded me of one unforgettable dream that I had in my early twenties. I was looking down at Han River from a hillside in Seoul. After looking at the surface of the river for some time, my vision was fixed on the river and the movement of water inside it, showing me the bottom of the river with sand and round stones. Then I started seeing the dancing and spinning stones touch and hit together, mashing and breaking them into pebbles and dust, which eventually will become part of the river itself: "Stone is Water, Water is Stone!" I screamed in the dream and woke up being shocked by this awakenness as if my brain was hit by a strong metal bell.

• Mary Jane Jacob
  Your awareness of the impermanence of all things and embodiment of compassion--which is key to the teachings of Buddha--have brought your earlier expressions of healing to another level. I now recognize that this was at the root of our work together for the Spoleto Festival USA in 2002: Planted Names--four unique carpets at the 1742 Drayton Hall, bearing the names of enslaved Africans and African-Americans who built and cultivated this Palladian plantation--and A Lighthouse Woman in which you used the Morris Island Lighthouse.

• Kimsooja
  When I was filming A Needle Woman in Lagos, I happened to visit to an island offshore from which slaves were put on ships to cross the Atlantic Ocean. Standing there, looking out, I could feel the enormous pain of those who departed. The horizontal line of the ocean looked like the saddest line I had ever seen in my life. Then when I visited Drayton Hall and learned about the history of African-American slaves from the other side of the Atlantic Ocean, I immediately saw this plantation site as a vast carpet where enslaved bodies were embedded. There are so many sad stories behind these colonial places. Carpets are not about the beauty of an artist's design, but about the labor of the carpet maker, so I chose carpets as the form to celebrate their labor and time.

• In the companion work, I considered this lighthouse on Morris Island as a witness of water, witnessing all the histories and memories standing still there. When I first visited it, I was so impressed by this lighthouse's loneliness. I related its loneliness to a woman's body and to women who wait for their sons, lovers, brothers and fathers to come home from the sea, who stand by the sea, waiting for them. I programmed a one-hour sequence of nine saturated colors that illuminated the whole tower, spilling onto and reflecting in the surrounding water, changing its rhythm as if it was breathing with the same rhythm of the ocean tides — in and out, inhale and exhale. It wasn't captured in video this time: it was important to experience in the site with the sound of the waves, and the air, and the real sequence of the rhythm of change. I miss the lighthouse.

• Mary Jane Jacob
  Yvonne Rand has spoken about how we can develop our capacity to be with suffering, as it arises, by developing our ability to be in attention. A way to develop this capacity is to continually, over and over, come back to the posture of the body that goes with being in attention. This arrangement of the body entails having the three energy centers in the torso in alignment: the head energy center for perception, the heart energy center for emotions, and the energy center in the belly, the hara, for spiritual strength and stability. When these three energy centers (located in the center of the body just in front of the spine) are lined up, then one is in the posture of attention or presence. This centered posture, in combination with a breath, allows one to be present. When I am fully present, in the moment, I can then be in the field of energy that I stand in with others. Here, in this field, I can more easily put myself in another's shoes, imagine their point of view--not in the "either/or" way of thinking but "both/and": I can hold both what is true in my experience and what is so for the other person. This is what it means to be present and, out of that, to have the skillfulness to develop the capacity to experience another person's suffering. So, Yvonne recognized that you had developed your capacity to become present in your breath with your own suffering as it arose and fell, and simultaneously experiencing the suffering of others, not as separate from yourself but as one: as you stood at the shore of the Yamuna River, on that coast of the island off Lagos, and in the Lowcountry of South Carolina.

• 2003년 3월 24일, 뉴욕의 경찰이 반전 시위에 참가한 140명을 체포했다. 이들은 뉴욕시 5번가 거리에 누워 교통을 마비시켜 도시를 정지 상태로 만들었다.

• 시위대는 바닥에 등을 댄 채 부동의 자세로 누워 있었고, 그들 중 일부는 전쟁에서 희생된 이라크 민간인의 사진을 들고 있었다. 경찰은 그들을 들어 올려 차에 태웠고, 그 과정에서 시위대의 몸으로 가득한 거리 위를 천천히 이동해 나갔다. 이른바 이 “다이인(die-in)” 시위는 수백 건의 크고 작은 시민 불복종 시위 중 하나로 미국 주도로 일어난 일어난 이라크 침공에 대한 행동이었다.

• 시민 불복종이란 기존의 법질서를 자명하고 지속적으로 위반하는 행위로 구성된다. 이러한 교란 행위는 의도적이며 그 범위가 제한적이다. 이와 같은 시민 불복종은 적절한 질문에 비유해 볼 수 있다. 어떤 체제에서 가장 조심스럽게 선택한 요소를 비판의 대상으로 삼았을 때, 그 대상이 비록 합법적으로 승인되었다 하더라도 불복종 행위는 표현적이고 효과적인 방법으로 그것의 거짓을 드러낸다.

• 시민 불복종의 특별한 형태는 그 당시에는 그럴 권리가 없었던 공공장소의 일부를 일시적으로 점거하는 시위라는 점에 있다.

• 여기에는 1960년대 미국 인종차별 반대 운동에서 대중화된 “연좌 농성(sit-in)”이 포함된다. (1960년 2월 1일 , 이른바 “그린즈버러 포(Greensboro Four)”로 알려진 흑인 시민 4명이 울워스 백화점의 백인 전용 바 카운터에 앉았던 것이 연좌 농성 형식의 상징적인 기원이다.) 이후 연좌 농성은 1968년 학생 운동에서도 채택되었으며, 다르게는 “비-인(be-in)”의 형태로 특정 장소에 (창의적으로) 함께 존재하는 히피들의 대규모 모임(가장 유명한 사례는 1967년 1월 14일 샌프란시스코 골든 게이트 공원에서 열린 바 있다)에서부터 공간 점거(occupation of premises)에 이르기까지를 아우른다. 이러한 행위들은 특정 공간을 점거하여 그와 결부된 권리들을 분쟁의 영역으로 이끌어내도록 압박을 가하는 방법인 것이다. 또한 규범적인 것에 대한 저항으로써 공간 점거는 그 공간과 그 안에 자리한 사람들에게 중요한 사안들에 대한 결정권을 획득하고자 하는 의지의 표현이다. 뉴욕의 “다이인(die-in)” 시위는 참여자가 차량에 치일 위험을 극적으로 보여주지만, 궁극적으로 그 핵심은 두 개의 상반된 이미지가 충돌하는 데 있다. 그 이미지 중 하나는 뉴욕이라는 장소, 즉 물질적 부를 상징하는 거리 위에 누운 시위대의 구체적인 이미지이며, 다른 하나는 가난한 국가에서 민간인이 전쟁에 희생되었음을 알릴 때 보게 되는 상투적 이미지인 시체 더미의 이미지이다. 즉석에서 만들어진 무대 위에서의 연극적 죽음을 통해 폭력을 거부하는 이 행위는 최후통첩과 같은 힘을 갖게 된다.

• 아무도 던지지 않는 돌처럼 조용히 지속되고 있는 모습을 담은 김수자의 작업은 필연적으로 여러 형태의 상징적 행위와 공명한다. 이 행위는 시민 사회의 능동적 구성원들이 미디어가 송출하는 전쟁의 정의에 대한 반응과 연관되어 있다. 이들이 전쟁을 정의하는 방식은 군사적 은유를 통해 표현한 움직임 또는 정치인들이 미디어를 통해 하달하는 축약적 발언들과 같다. 이 모든 것은 폭탄, 전단지, 구호 물자처럼 항상 위에서 아래로 떨어지는 방식으로 움직인다. 이러한 일방향적 운동, 곧 위에서 아래로 향하는 운동을 가장 설득력 있게 드러내는 이미지 중 하나는 한 트럭을 찍은 사진이다. 구호 요원들이 트럭 위에서 굶주린 사람들이 뻗은 손 위로 식량 꾸러미를 던지고 있고, 트럭의 지붕 위 맨 꼭대기에는 기자들이 서서 카메라를 아래로 겨누고 있다. 트럭 위에서 촬영된 이 장면이 텔레비전 화면에 어떻게 보일지는 쉽게 상상할 수 있다. 그것은 바로 우리, 친절한 시청자들이 다른 이들의 손을 통해 궁핍한 사람들에게 음식을 건네주는 장면일 것이다.

• 김수자는 자신의 존재를 하나의 틈으로 제시한다. 그녀가 보여주는 부동의 “존재-하기(being-in)”는 점차 관객의 시야에서 사라지며, 그 장소 자체처럼 익숙하고 자명한 것이 된다. 여기서 한 장소에 존재한다는 것은 곧 그 장소가 되는 것이다. 물결이 돌을 감싸버리듯, 사각지대를 우리의 눈이 메우듯이. 어떤 장소에 머무름으로써 존재는 그 장소에 대한 권리를 획득한다. 그것은 이데올로기와 성문화된 법과 같이 장소의 외부에 위치한 특별한 권한에 의해 부여되는 것이 아니다. 불확실한 시간과 공간, 움직이는 도시(cities on the move)에서 일정 시간동안 한 공간이 그 자체로 하나의 장소가 된다. 이는 (국경을) 가로질러 바느질하고 여행하기, (거리에서) 구걸하기, (바위) 위와 (하늘) 아래에 눕기, (나무) 아래에 앉기, (행진하는 군중) 앞에 서기를 통해 이뤄진다. 그리고 또 위와 아래를 꿰매고, 자신을 이용해 꿰매며, 사라지는 바느질, 실 땀이 겉에 보이지 않는 공그르기 바느질을 통해서.

• 최전방에서의 전형적인 TV 보도: 많은 고생 끝에 기자가 현장에 도착한다. 피곤하지만 기쁜 얼굴이 그의 보도가 진실임을 확인해준다. 헬멧과 방탄 조끼를 착용한 기자가 마이크를 들고 있다. 그는 종종 군복과 같은 위장복 차림을 하고 있지만, 무장하지 않았기 때문에 우리는 그를 신뢰해야 한다. 기자는 우리의 눈을 똑바로 쳐다보며 말한다. 그의 뒤에는 사건이 벌어지고 있거나, 혹은 사건의 서막이나 결말이 일어나고 있다. 차량, 군인들, 민간인들, 불타버린 폐허, 붕괴된 장비, 점령된 다리, 몇몇 아이들의 움직임. 화면 하단의 자막은 장소에 대한 모든 의심을 소거한다. 구체적인 지명과 사람이 그곳에 실제로 있으며 우리에게 말하고 있다고 느끼기 때문이다. 더 이상의 의심은 없다. 이것이 바로 현존이며, 우리는 그것을 경험하고 있는 것이다.

• 세계 여러 도시에서 촬영한 일련의 영상에서 김수자는 자신의 얼굴을 보여주지 않는다. 고정된 카메라는 움직임 없이 서 있는 한 인물의 뒷모습을 촬영한다. 이 검은 수직 형상은 화면 중앙의 시야를 부분적으로 가린다. 화면의 가장자리에는 군중이 모여 있으며, 그것은 프레임의 가장자리와 중앙의 어두운 형상 사이로 단편적으로 보이며, 그 형상에 초점을 맞추기가 어렵다. 여기서 나타나는 장면을 바라보는 우리의 시선은 이 형상의 인물에게 “위임된” 것처럼 보인다. 우리는 이 인물의 얼굴을 볼 수 없기에 그에 대해 거의 알지 못한다. 눈을 뜨고 있는지, 무엇을 바라보고 있는 것인지 알 수 없다. 그는 그저 완강한 존재감으로, 우리의 시야 속에 생긴 하나의 틈으로, 우리가 온전히 보고자 하는 이미지와 우리 사이에 서 있다. 우리 앞에 서 있는 그 사람은, 더 많이 보기 위해 밀어내고 싶은 존재다. 김수자는 관람자로 하여금 결코 완전히 충족되지 않을 부분적 인식의 상태에 머물게 한다.

• 김수자의 작업은 1960–70년대 개념미술에서 인간의 현존을 다루는 방식과 정치적 영역에서 특수한 맥락을 고려하여 인간의 현존을 연출하는 다양한 시민 불복종 시위 형식 사이의 유사성을 떠올리게 한다.

• 1970년, 에이드리언 파이퍼(Adrian Piper)는 자신이 “예술의 객체가 되기로” 결심하며 작품으로서의 오브제 제작을 중단했다. 그녀는 다양한 공공장소(거리, 바, 버스 정류장 등)에서 수행된 일련의 퍼포먼스에서 자기자신을 일상의 질서 어딘가를 교란시키는 “페르소나”로 이용했으며, 그 모습을 목격한 사람들이 이 타자의 출현에 어떻게 반응하는지 시험했다. 〈촉매과정 III(Catalysis III )〉(1970)에서 파이퍼는 하얀 페인트로 뒤덮인 옷에 “WET PAINT(젖은 페인트)”라는 팻말을 달고 백화점에 들어섰다. 파이퍼가 만들어낸 이러한 상황은 흑인 예술가가 폭력을 은폐하는 미학과 관습의 왜곡된 영역에 개입하는 직접 행동을 보여준다.

• 김수자 또한 폭력의 가능성에 맞서서 자신이 채택한 인격체(혹은 페르소나)를 통해 대응한다. 나이지리아 라고스에서 촬영된 〈구걸하는 여인(Beggar Woman)〉에서 김수자는 길가에 구걸하는 자세로 손을 내밀고 앉아 있다. 처음에 그녀가 내민 손은 비어 있다. 누군가가 그 위에 동전을 올려놓고, 손은 닫히지 않은 채로 있어 다른 누군가가 그것을 갈취해 간다. 이와 같은 미세하고 세부적인 상황에서 금전과 연관된 의도와는 별개로 신뢰와 책임의 문제가 드러난다. 구걸하는 여인의 손은 돈이 경유하는 일종의 중간 지점 또는 장소가 된다. 그 손은 선물을 받아들이고 또 내어준다. 구걸하는 이 인물은 특정한 어떤 공동체를 형성하게 된다. 설득과 저항의 게임과 결부된 일반적인 구걸 행위에서 벗어난 형태로 김수자는 관계의 네트워크를 형성하고, 그녀 자신을 둘러싼 하나의 경제를 작동시킨다. 김수자의 작업은 항아리에 585달러를 담으며 시작되었던 리 로자노(Lee Lozano)의 〈리얼 머니 피스(Real Money Piece)〉(1969)를 떠올리게 하기도 한다. 로자노가 만난 사람들은 그 항아리에서 돈을 꺼내거나 추가할 수 있었고, 그와 연결된 상황, 관계자의 성명과 관련 금액은 기록되었다. 내부에서부터 경제를 전복하는 경제적 순환이 형성되었던 것이다.

• 만약 사물에 대한 본질적 자기 의문이 미니멀리즘적 태도에서 비롯된 것이라고 정의한다면, 데니스 오펜하임(Dennis Oppenheim)의 말처럼 그것은 “감각적 긴장을 사물에서 장소로 이동시키는 것”이라고 할 수 있다. 김수자의 작업은 바로 이러한 이동을 촉발시킨다. 그녀의 작업을 바라보는 이의 주의는 사물에서 장소로 이동한다. 그리고 그녀는 관객의 주의를 이끌어 자신이 있는 자리로 온전히 옮겨놓는다.

• On March 24, 2003 the police in New York arrested a hundred and forty participants of an anti-war demonstration, who had lain down in Fifth Avenue, blocking traffic and bringing the city to a standstill.

• The demonstrators lay motionless on their backs; some were holding photographs of civilian war casualties in Iraq. Police officers lifted them off the ground and carried them into cars, slowly making their way along the body-strewn street. That "die-in" demonstration was one of hundreds of bigger and smaller manifestations of civil disobedience which swept over cities in all parts of the world in response to the war waged under American leadership in Iraq.

• An act of civil disobedience consists in an ostentatious and consistent breach of the existing law. The disturbance is deliberate and limited in scope. Such an act of disobedience may be compared to a well-posed question. When it is one carefully chosen element of the system that becomes the object of criticism, the act is expressive and effective in exposing a false, albeit legally sanctioned, state of affairs.

• A special form of civil disobedience are demonstrations in which a group of people temporarily occupies a section of public space to which they have no right at that moment. This includes such forms of protest as "sit-in", popularized by the American movement against racial segregation in the 1960s (the iconic sit-in by four black citizens, known as the "Greensboro Four", started at the counter of a white-only bar in Woolworth's department store on the first of February 1960) and then adopted by the student revolt of 1968, or "be-in", demonstration through being together (creatively) in a certain area - from mass gatherings of hippies (the most famous one took place in the Golden Gate Park, San Francisco, on the 14 of January 1967) to the occupation of premises, which is also a form of pressure through occupying space the right to which is disputed. Occupying a place in defiance of the norms regulating its use is an expression of the wish to be able to decide maters important to that place and to the people in it. New York's "die-in" dramatizes the risk of participants being run over by cars, but its main point is made through the clash between the concrete image of demonstrators lying in a street symbolizing ultimate material wealth and the vision of a heap of bodies - the clich image of how war affects civilians in a poor country. The renunciation of violence expressed in the form of a theatrical death on an improvised stage acquires the force of an ultimatum.

• Quiet and persevering like stones which no one throws, Kim Sooja's works inevitably resonate with various forms of symbolic behaviour through which active members of civil society respond to the definitions of war put forward in media commentaries, using military metaphors of movement, and to the summary interpretations which politicians direct through the same media - always downwards, like bombs, leaflets and food supplies. One of the most suggestive images revealing this one-way movement - from the top down - is the agency photo of a truck, from which charity workers are throwing food parcels directly into the outstretched hands of hungry people. At the very top, on the roof of the truck, a group of reporters are standing, pointing their cameras down. It is easy to imagine what this scene, filmed from the roof of the truck, would look like on a TV screen: it would be us, the kindly viewers, who would be handing out food through other's hands to the people in need.

• Kim Sooja stages her presence as a gap: motionless "being-in", which is gradually removed from the onlooker's field of vision, becoming something as known and obvious as the place itself. Being in a place becomes the place. Like the surface of water closes over a stone, like the eye fills in a blind spot for us. By remaining in a place, being gains a right to it, not through some special title located outside the place, in the space of ideology and codified law, but because it becomes a place, for some time a certain place in uncertain times and in places of uncertainty, in cities on the move. Sewing and travelling across (borders), begging in (the streets), lying on (a rock) and under (the sky), sitting under (a tree), standing in front of (a marching crowd). Sewing the top to the bottom, sewing with oneself, with a disappearing stitch, a blind stitch.

• A typical TV report from the front lines: after many hardships a journalist managed to get there; his tired, happy face confirms the truth of his account. Wearing a helmet and a bullet-proof vest, the reporter grips a microphone. Although he's often dressed in camouflage, he is unarmed and that's why we should trust him. The reporter looks us in the eye and speaks to us. Behind him there is action, or just an epilogue or prologue to action. The movement of vehicles, of soldiers, of civilians, burnt-out ruins, wrecked equipment, a captured bridge, some children. The caption on the screen removes all doubt as to the place: a specific geographical name combined with a concrete person who is there and is talking to us now. There can be no more doubt: this is presence and we are experiencing it.

• In a series of films shot in different cities around the world Kim Sooja does not show her face. A static camera films a motionless, standing figure from behind. The black vertical shape in the centre of the screen partially blocks the view. On the edges of the screen a crowd throngs; we see it fragmentarily, between the edge of the frame and the dark figure in the middle, on which it is hard to focus. Our view of the scene taking place here is as if "delegated" to that person, about whom we don't know much, not being able to see her face. We don't even know if her eyes are open, if she is looking. She's just a stubborn presence, a gap in our field of vision, standing between us and the image we want to see in its entirety. It's someone who is standing in front of us and whom we want to push aside to be able to see more. Kim Sooja leaves us with this sense of partial knowledge, which will not be made complete.

• Her works make one think of the analogies between ways of working with human presence in the conceptual art of the 1960s and 70s and various forms of demonstrating civil disobedience through a political staging of human presence with reference to a given context.

• In 1970 Adrian Piper decided to "become the object of art" and to stop making objects. In a series of performances realized in various public places (street, bar, bus stop etc.) the artist used herself as a "persona" slightly disrupting the usual order of things and testing the reactions of onlookers to the appearance of the Other. In Catalysis III (1970) she entered a department store wearing clothes covered in white paint, with the sign WET PAINT. The situations arranged by Adrian Piper were direct interventions by the black artist in the falsified sphere of aesthetics and custom, which conceal violence.

• Kim Sooja also confronts the possibility of violence and responds to it with her directed personality. In Beggar Woman (Lagos, Nigeria) Kim Sooja sits in the street with her hand outstretched, in a beggar's pose. At the beginning the hand is empty; then someone puts some coins into it; the hand does not close, so somebody else steals them. In this microsituation, apart from economic motivations, issues of trust and responsibility emerge. The beggar's hand becomes a place of transit, an intermediate point/spot in the transit of money. It accepts and offers a gift. The beggar creates a certain community. Abstaining from the usual begging activity - the game of persuasion and resistance - she establishes a network of relations, sets a whole business operation in motion around herself. Kim Sooja's work is also reminiscent of the Real Money Piece (1969) be Lee Lozano, who started with 585 dollars in a jar. The people she met could either take out or add money to the jar; the circumstances, names and sums were recorded. An economic circulation was created, undermining the economy from inside.

• If we define art stemming from a minimalist syndrome of progressive self-questioning of the object and focusing on the conditions of its presentation as, using Dennis Oppenheim's words, "displacement of sensory pressures from object to place", Kim Sooja's works certainly initiate a move of attention from object to place. Kim Sooja attracts our attention only to transfer it entirely to the place where she is.

• Kimsooja transforms the quotidian act of sewing and traditional cloths into art that embraces life and society. She has exhibited her art all over the world, including many prominent international art biennales such as Venice, Sao Paolo, and Lyon. It was sometime in the early 1980s, Kim recalls, that she came to realize cloth as a new artistic medium, while sewing a blanket cover with her mother. In the act of sewing, which necessarily accompanies the material of cloth, Kim also discovered a possibility of overcoming the limitations of the "surface plane" — the concept to which the modernist-dominated art world still was fettered. Through the late 1980s, she produced a series of works — drawings and paintings done on unstretched cloths — to break away from the painting canvas, but these works were still an extension of 2-dimensional painting. In the early 1990s, Kim began to produce the series titled Deductive Objects; she took traditional everyday objects such as a doorframe, an A-frame, and a bobbin, and swathed them with cloths, in the process reassuring the objects’ basic structures. With this series of works, Kim reached a turning point in her art, in which cloth is no longer treated as a 2-dimensional pictorial surface, but a material open to many 3-dimensional potentials.

• Kim’s encounter with the bottari (a bundle of household belongings wrapped in traditional Korean bedcovers), for which she would be widely known, took place rather fortuitously when she was in artist’s residency at P.S.1, New York. One day, Kim began to see wrapped bundles"bottaris"she had collected in a corner of her studio with a new eye. Kim states that the bottari turns flat cloths into a three-dimensional object through the simple act of "wrapping" — a method of making that is both painterly and sculptural; the bottari is a flat surface turned into a volumetric object, and can also further evoleve into an installation when located in specific place. Although she was initially interested in cloth as an alternative to the modernist flat surface, Kimsooja soon came to understand the material’s infinite possibilities through her exploration of its multi-faceted character. It was through her discovery of the bottari, the form that can flexibly adapt to different environments, that her work began to develop spatially.

• In her 1997 video work Cities on the Move - 2727 km bottari truck, she traveled throughout the countryside of Korea for 11 days in a small truck piled high with bottaris in the back. This work is an eloquent testimony to how her work went through the processes of painting, object, and installation, gradually exploding out of the gallery walls. Kim moved often when she was a child because her father, who was a serviceman, had frequent job transfers. In that sense, Cities on the move is a travel through the memories of her own childhood. At the same time, it is a metaphor for her current state of being, an artist who constantly travels for work to different places in the world, and the work expresses the sensibilities of "on the move" and "itinerant" inherent in the bottari. When the video protion of the work, accompanied by the bottari truck, were shown at the 1998 Bienal do Sao Paolo and the 1999 La Biennale di Venezia, Kimsooja became known in the art world as the so-called bottari artist who poses the questions of identity, mobility, borderlessness, and nomadism.

• The main methodology of her artmaking"sewing"also went through subsequent evolutionary processes. In more recent years, sewing for Kim has become a conceptual act, without an actual needle or thread, of forming and mediating relations. Pointing to the function of "healing" which the needle possesses, the artist compares her own being to the needle. For Kim, sewing is "like breathing, or communicating" and is an act of bringing separate beings together by linking them, one stitch at a time. The needle is a mediator that travels in the gap, closing it. But when the needle completes its work, the trace of its labor remains only as the thread which it was attached to. The artist identifies with the needle, then in the sense that when her role as mediator is finished, her being becomes "Nothing".

• The artist as the needle appears again and again in A Needle Woman (1999-2000), a series of video works which records Kim’s repeated performances on the streets of Shibuya (Tokyo), Shanghai, Delhi, and New York. In all these videos, Kimsooja stands motionless, with her back facing the camera and her front facing the oncoming traffic of pedestrians. The bypassing people’s responses captured by the camera’s eye are varied depending on the location of the performance. The work is a manifestation of the artist’s wish to sew the self and the others, and the self and the world into relationships, using her own body as the medium. Kim explains A Needle Woman as follows: "the artist’s body, as a medium, or a barometer or a compass, forms only unseen links between people passing by it, but in the end, it becomes alienated and almost disappears into the state of nothingness, like an invisible man." Earlier, Kimsooja’s art developed cloths (an irreplaceable part of our lives) and sewing (traditionally women’s labor) into the general human context through her art. Now, she sees her art as a metaphor, and in it, she wishes to make relationships of healing, cleansing, and ultimately, embrace.

• 베니스, 상파울로, 리용 등 세계 유수의 비엔날레에 초대되면서 세계를 무대로 활발한 활동을 하고 있는 김수자는 전통적인 천과 바느질이라는 일상적인 행위를 삶과 사회를 포용하는 예술로 승화시킨 작가이다. 그는 1980년대 초반 어머니와 함께 이불을 꿰매다가 천이라는 소재를 새롭게 자각 하게 되었고, 천이라는 소재에 필연적으로 수반되는 바느질의 행위에서 당시 자신은 물론 미술계가 천착하였던 '평면' 의 한계를 극복할 가능성을 발견하게 된다. 그러나 주로 천 위에 드로잉 또는 채색을 가미한 그의 1980년대 후반까지의 작품들은 비록 캔버스를 벗어나긴 하였으나 평회화의 또 다른 연장이었다고 볼 수 있다. 그러다 1990년에 들어서면서 창호지 문틀이나 지게, 얼레 등 전통적인 일상의 오브제들을 천으로 감싸 그 기본 구조를 재확인하는 <연역적 오브제> 시리즈 작업을 하면서 그는 천을 평면적으로 다루던 기존의 작업에서 탈피하여 천이 가진 입체성에 주목하기 시작한다.

• 김수자를 세계적으로 유명하게 한 보따리와의 만남은 뉴욕 P.S. 1에서 작업을 하던 중 우연히 이루어졌다. 천 작업을 하려고 싸놓았던 보따리를 어느 순간 이제까지와는 전혀 다른 새로운 시각으로 보게 된 것이다. 작가의 말에 따르면 보따리는 평면적인 천을'묶는다'는 단순한 행위를 통해 서 3차원화 할 수 있으며 따라서 회화적 방법을 연출할 수 있는 동시에 볼륨있는 조각으로 볼 수도 있다는 것이다. 보따리는 평면이 3차원화한 입체내지는 오브제이면서 그것이 놓이는 장소성이라 는 문제와 연관될 때 설치로서 자리하기도 한다. 처음에 평면에 대한 대체물로 천을 채택하였던 김수자는 천의 여러 가지 다양성을 모색하면서 그것의 끊임없은 확산 가능성을 깨닫게 되었고, 특히 공간에 유연하게 대처할 수 있는 보따리를 발견하면서 계속적으로 공간, 장소에 대한 관심을 확대해 나아갔다.

• 1997년 11일간 트럭에 보따리를 가득 싣고 전국을 일주하는 퍼포먼스를 담아 제작한 비디오 작품 〈떠도는 도시들-2727km 보따리 트럭〉은 평면, 오브제, 설치 작업의 과정을 두루 거치면서 그의 작업 영역이 전시장 밖으로 더욱 확장되어 나아갔음을 보여 준다.이 작품은 군인이었던 아버지를 따라 이사를 자주 하였던 어린 시절에 대한 기억의 흐름을 따라가는 여정이자 작업을 위해 세 계 곳곳을 돌아다니는 현재 자신의 모습을 은유하면서 보따리 자체에 내재되어 있는 '이동'과 '유 랑' 의 정서를 표출한 작품이다. 이 보따리 트럭이 1998년 상 파울로 비엔날레와 1999년의 베니 스 비엔날레에 출품되면서 김수자는 세계미술계에 유랑과 자유로운 의식의 유목주의적 사유와 함 께 정체성에 대한 문제 등을 제기한 일명 '보따리' 작가로 알려지게 된다.
  김수자 작업의 기본이었던 바느질이라는 행위도 실제로 꿰매는 행위 없이 실과 바늘이 없이도 관계를 맺어 가는 개념적인 바느질 작업으로 전개되어 나아갔다. 작가는 특히 바늘이 갖는 '치유의 도구'로서의 기능에 주목하면서 스스로를 바늘에 비유하기 시작한다. 그에게 바느질 행위는 '호흡 또는 소통같은 것'이며 분리된 것들을 한땀 한땀 이어 나가 관계를 맺게 하는 행위이다. 바늘은 매개체로서 갈라진 틈 사이를 지나면서 그 틈을 연결시키지만 정작 남는 것은 자신과 연결되었던 실만이 흔적으로 남을 뿐이다. 작가는 이렇게 매개체로서의 역할이 끝난 후 무(無)화되는 바늘과 자기 자신을 동일시 하는 것이다.

• 바늘로서의 작가의 모습은 일본 동경의 시부야 거리와 중국 상하이, 인도 델리, 그리고 미국 뉴욕에서 벌인 퍼포먼스를 담은 비디오 작품 <바늘 여인>에서 분명하게 나타난다. 길 한가운데에서 마주 오는 행인들을 바라 보며 미동도 없이 서 있는 작가의 모습과 각 도시 행인들의 다양한 반응을 담은 이 비디오 작업은 자신의 몸을 매개로 하여 나와 타인, 나와 세계의 관계를 엮고자 하는 작가 의 시각을 반영하고 있다. 그는 이 작업에 대해 "하나의 매개체, 혹은 바로미터 또는 나침반으로서 의 작가의 몸은 인파 속에서 스쳐 가는 사람들을 보이지 않게 관계 지을 뿐 결국 투명 인간처럼 거의 무의 상태로 소외되고 사라지고 만다"고 설명한다. 우리의 일상 생활과 떨어질 수 없는 천이라는 소재와 전통적으로 여성의 노동이었던 바느질이라는 일상적 행위를 인간의 보편적인 문맥으로 발전시켜 나간 김수자는 결국 자신의 예술을 사유하는 것으로 정의하고 그 속에 치유, 정화, 그리고 포용을 내포하는 관계 맺기를 지향하고 있다.

• 한국 미술에 있어 1980년대 중·후반은 종래의 모더니즘 미학의 지배로부터 벗어나 좀더 넓고 개방된 시야를 확보하기 위해 노력한 시기였다. 이 시기에는 정치·사회적으로 민주화에 대한 열기와 올림픽을 계기로 한 국제화가 촉발됨으로써 오랫동안 사회를 지배하던 폐쇄적 사유방식과 획일적 가치관이 점진적으로 붕괴되기 시작하였다. 또한 이 시기는 기존의 인습과 새로운 사고를 위한 열정이 혼융된 하나의 과도적 시기이기도 하였다.

• 형식주의 모더니즘을 거부하는 리얼리즘에 대한 관심 은 한편으로는 민족적 현실과 결부되어 ‘민중미술’로 대표되는 사회적 리얼리즘으로, 형식주의를 비판적으로 계승코자 한 입장에서는 새로운 형상성의 추구와 복합 매체에 대한 새로운 인식으로 나타나게 되었다. 뿐만 아니라 작품이 놓이는 공간이나 환경과의 상관성 속에서 작품을 재문맥화하는 설치미술이나 장소성이 강조된 새 로운 양식으로 확산되어 나타나기도 하였다.

• 서구 포스트모던에 대한 깊은 이해는 부족하였지만, 1980년대 중·후반은 모더니즘의 미학이 가지는 제반 문제점들이 폭넓게 검증되기 시작하면서, 탈(脫)모던의 양상들이 매우 복잡하게 대두되었다. 뿐만 아니라 과거와 달리 대규모의 집단활동보다는 다양한 소그룹 활동이 활성화되었고, 더 나아가 독특한 개인 활동들을 중심으 로 개별성과 다원성이 강조되기 시작하였다. 획일적 거대 담론보다는 작은 이야기들과 소수자들의 가치에 주목하기 시작한 것도 이때부터이다. 서구 문화에 대한 비판과 대안으로 전통과 그 언어에 대한 관심이 증폭되어 전통을 소재로 한 작업들과 개인의 체험을 기반으로 한 작업들이 다양하게 나타나기 시작하였다.

• 이 시기에는 과거에 비해 역량 있는 많은 여성 작가들 이 등장하게 되는데, 종래의 남성 중심의 미술계 구도와는 다른 큰 변화로 간주할 수 있을 것이다. 김수자는 이 시기에 등장한 매우 출중한 여성 작가 중 하나이다. 그녀는 현재 각종 국제비엔날레 등을 통해 확고한 국제적 인지도를 획득한 작가인데, 그녀의 초기 작업은 현재의 작 업으로 나아갈 수 있는 많은 잠재적 요소를 가지고 있었다. 그녀의 작업은 이불보나 보자기와 같은 천을 사용하며, 바느질을 기본적인 기법으로 사용한다. 천을 조각보처럼 꿰매어 이어 붙이기도 하고 천으로 오브제를 감싸기도 한다. 개울가에서 천을 빨아 널어놓기도 하고, 천을 카페의 탁자보로 사용하여 작품을 일상 공간 속에서 실재적 기능과 조형적 요소로 작동시키기도 한다. 또 천을 보따리로 만들어 전시장에 늘어놓기도 하고, 보따리들을 트럭에 싣고 자신이 태어나고 성장했던 지역들을 옮겨 다니기도 한다. 이외에도 그녀는 문화권이 다른 새로운 지역들을 여행하며, 여행지를 소재로 한 다양한 유목적 사유를 구현하는 비디오 작업을 수행하기도한다.

• 그녀의〈땅과 하늘〉(1984)은 초기작으로 당시의 조형 적 관심사를 잘 구현해 내고 있는 작품 중 하나이다. 그 녀의 작품은 형식적으로는 전통 규방문화의 산물인 조각보의 현대적 변용처럼 보이기도 한다. 금박의 전통문양을 곁들인 원색의 비단 천과 같은 이불보 등의 천 조각들을 한 땀 한 땀 정성 들여 꿰매어 가는 공정은 동양 여성의 감수성을 조형화해 내는 적절한 코드로 작용한다. 또한 천이 가지는 가변성은 그것이 보자기로 사용될 때 증폭되며, 보자기는 비밀스러움과 내포성, 이동성 그리고 여인의 애환 등과 같은 복합적 의미를 함의토록 한다. 또한 바느질은 다양한 이미지들을 연결시키는 재문맥화 행위이며, 또한 여성만이 가질 수 있는 삶의 애환이며, 애환을 구성하는 내러티브 만들기이기도 하다. 천들이 여인의 삶의 숱한 편린이라면 바느질은 그 편린들을 모았다 흩어버리는 사유의 과정이기도 하다. 이러한 의미에서 그녀의 바느질은 미지의 세계를 여행하는 여정이며, 한 곳에 정착하기를 거부하는 그녀의 유목적 사유의 조형화이다.

Action 1: "A One-Word Name Is An Anarchist's Name."

Identity of the one word name

• When I decided to open a website using my name — which I hesitated to do for years because of its commercial aspect — I was hoping for an ideal society and relationship among people in the art world in which we could share real opinions with honesty, sincerity, dignity and love of art and life. I hope that my website project will not just introduce my activities but can bring more articulated discussions and criticism on art and the world.

• I am careful to open this site, as mass media is one of the most influential media and another form of power which often leads this (art)world unfairly and untruthfully. But this is also what I wanted to work out and to bring out the true face of it — by opening another critical mass media to balance the public opinions. Think how much internet information and how many discussions are going on in this world — it is excessive. But I find most of them nothing but consuming information which have no content or true concern about art and the world.

• I feel a responsibility now to put my endeavor to the (art)world in a modest way, even with one single person in this whole world to share and to support the real concerns — which I've been thinking for sometime, experiencing how the opinion of the society can be twisted by leading the public with wrong information or by not giving information, or by manipulating the reality mainly using mass media — partly because they are ignorant, partly because they are insecure, and are serving themselves for money and power. I wish to see the real art and meet real spirit, and to create something real with real people, and share it with every single person one to one, mostly discovering the ideas that have not been revealed or appreciated enough in this world.

• One night, I suddenly discovered an important aspect in naming the website domain which keeps mostly one-word name — and it drove me to make up my decision to open a website for the public which I've been hesitating to do for years — like others, <www.kimsooja.com>. I was struck by the fact that it shows no reference of the name which has two or three words put together, with the first name and the family name, sometimes with a middle name.

• A one word name refuses gender identity, marital status, socio-political or cultural and geographical identity by not separating the family name and the first name. Action One: "A One-Word Name Is An Anarchist's Name" is my first statement for opening my website project.

• You are invited to my station to share any concern or critical ideas and I will communicate with you one to one, posing questions, inviting significant artists, writers and thinkers, as well as curators in the near future.

• Thanks very much for your concern and support for this project.

• Please feel free to contact me if you have any questions or ideas to share.

• I look forward to communicating with you soon.

• Sincerely,

• Kimsooja

액션 1: "한 단어 이름은 무정부주의자의 이름이다"

한 단어 이름의 정체성

• 상업성에 대한 고민으로 주저하던 수년을 뒤로하고 내가 홈페이지를 열기로 결정했을때, 나는 예술과 삶에 대한 진실성과 순수함, 존엄과 사랑이 함께하는 진정한 의견을 나눌 수 있는 작품 안에서 이상적인 사회와 인간관계를 만들어 갈 수 있기를 기대하고 있었다. 이 홈페이지는 단순히 내 작업과 활동을 소개하는 도구가 아니라 미술과 세계에 대한 더 활발한 대화와 평론을 불러오는 계기가 되길 바란다.

• 매스미디어는 가장 강력한 미디어이자 자주 이 (미술)세계를 불공평하거나 진실되지 못하게 만들어 가는 큰 힘을 가지고 있다는 것을 알기에 나는 이 홈페이지를 여는 것이 조심스럽다. 그러나 이러한 문제를 대중 앞에 또 하나의 중요한 매스미디어 형식으로 내놓음으로써 문제의 진정한 단면을 보고 부딪쳐보고 싶은 부분이기도 하다. 얼마나 많은 정보와 토론이 인터넷상에서 이루어지고 있는지 생각해 보자. 이는 수를 셀 수 없다. 그러나 이들의 대부분은 예술과 삶에 대한 진정한 염려가 배제되어 있고 우리의 시간만 낭비하게 한다.

• 나는 이 (미술)세계로 허식없는 노력을 쏟는 것에 대한 의무감을 느낀다. 그리고 단 한 명이 될지라도 진실된 염려를 나누며 함께하고자 한다. 한동안 생각해 왔던 것이지만 무지와 불안감때문에 혹은 돈과 힘을 얻기 위해 잘못된 정보, 고의적 정보의 부재, 통신매체를 이용해 현실을 왜곡하는 것은 결국 대중이 사회에 대한 뒤틀린 의견을 갖게 되는 결과를 낳는다. 나는 진정한 예술과 진정한 혼을 만날 수 있기를 바란다. 참된 사람들과 참된 무언가를 만들 수 있길 바란다. 그리고 이 세계에서 충분히 이야기되지 못하거나 가치를 인정받지 못한 것들을 발견해 보고 그것을 모든 이들과 나누고 함께하고 싶다.

• 어느 날 밤 나는 한 단어로 된 홈페이지 주소의 이름을 생각해 보며 갑작스러운 중요한 발견을 하게 되었다. 그리고 이 발견은 수년간 망설여오던 대중을 위한 홈페이지를 만들도록 이끌었다. <www.kimsooja.com> 나는 이 웹주소가 성, 이름, 또는 미들네임 등 두 세개의 단어로 이루어진 이름의 구분을 두지 않는다는 사실에 놀라고 말았다.

• 한 단어의 이름은 성과 이름을 구별하지 않음으로써 성별, 결혼의 유무, 사회 정치적, 문화적, 또는 지리적 신분을 드러내지 않는다. 액션 1: “한 단어 이름은 무정부주의자의 이름이다” 는 나의 홈페이지를 여는 것에 대한 첫 번째 성명이다.

• 나는 어떤 의견이나 비평적 아이디어도 함께 할 수 있도록 여러분을 이 공간에 초대한다. 나는 이곳에 찾아오는 여러분 개개인과 의견을 나눌 것이며 가까운 시일 내에 작가, 사상가, 그리고 큐레이터들을 이 공간으로 초대할 것이다.

• 마지막으로 이 프로젝트에 대한 염려와 지지에 깊은 감사를 드린다.

• 의문과 의견을 나누고 싶은 분들은 언제라도 연락을 바란다.

• 곧 함께 의견을 나누길 기대하며.
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